


The face of the moon

by comeaftermejackrobinson



Category: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
Genre: Angst, Drama, F/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-26
Updated: 2017-12-01
Packaged: 2018-09-12 06:19:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 38,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9059218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/comeaftermejackrobinson/pseuds/comeaftermejackrobinson
Summary: While working on a case, Detective Inspector Jack Robinson witnesses a traumatic event that reminds him strongly of war. The same shell-shock syndrome symptoms that drove him away from his former wife reappear. The only thing he doesn't fear is these symptoms scaring off the woman he loves now, for he hasn't seen Phryne Fisher since the day they solved the Gerty Haynes murder case.





	1. Chapter 1

“ _No-man’s land under snow is like the face of the moon: chaotic, crater ridden, uninhabitable, awful, the abode of madness._ ”

 

Lieutenant Wilfred Owen, in a letter to his mother, January 1917.

 

Detective Inspector Jack Robinson was a man of routine. He showered and shaved first thing in the morning. He put on the kettle and read the newspaper. He had a cup of tea and a piece of toast before he left home for work. He drove his car to the City South Police Station- he was a responsible, compliant driver and had never been given as much as a warning or a speeding ticket. As he walked to his office from the building entrance, he greeted his constables with a head nod. He worked his cases with meticulous care. He stopped at a small market near his house every evening for fresh vegetables, and then went over case files while he ate supper. He caught up on his reading and gardening on his days off, and he enjoyed to ride all the way across town and back on his bicycle every Sunday morning.

 

It was never different. It was always the same. Things rarely changed.

 

But when they did change, they wreaked havoc.

 

He met Ms. Fisher. Things changed. Chaos followed. He fell in love with her. More change. Chaos morphed into madness. He thought she had died in a car crash. The pain was unbearable. He drowned in regrets.

 

The body in the wreckage wasn’t hers. Relief washed over him. He drowned in alcohol. He decided they were better off apart. He hadn’t seen her in two months. Things hadn’t changed back to the way they had been before they’d met. He missed her. He was sad. Love morphed into longing. Depression followed.

 

He took comfort where he could and supposed there would not be more changes now. That things would stay the way they were at the moment.

 

He was wrong.

 

He woke up early on April 25th and followed his usual routine. He showered and shaved, read the newspaper, and breakfasted in the kitchenette. He drove to work, nodded his head good morning to his junior constables, and sat at his desk to revise the evidence on his latest case: the murder of a train guard.

 

Something another train guard had said when they’d first taken his statement didn’t seem right. Jack knew there was something wrong, he just couldn’t tell what it was despite being sure the answer was probably staring at him right in the face. After half an hour, he noticed a pattern he had missed before.

 

He grabbed his hat and coat from the hanger and informed Constable Collins that he would try to catch a train to Craigieburn, where the victim had lived. He wanted to talk to the wife again, and he wanted to go to Craigieburn by train. He had a suspicion of what the motive could have been, but he needed to check something first to confirm it.

 

He was waiting in line at one of the ticket windows located at the entry to Flinders Street railway station when all of a sudden a noise like thunder was heard, and the distinctive smell of smoke filled the air. Then there were screams, a turmoil, and panic ensued.

 

The sounds, the smells, the smoke and the uncontrolled chaos- he was immediately taken back to a time and a place he had fought very hard to put behind. Many years had passed, but in that moment he could have sworn he was still in the war, that it all had been a dream, that the conflict hadn’t ended and he had not made it home yet.

 

A bomb had just gone off at platforms 4 and 5.


	2. Chapter 2

“ _The storm lashes us, out of the confusion of grey and yellow the hail of splinters whips forth the childlike cries of the wounded, and in the night shattered life groans painfully into silence. Our hands are earth, our bodies clay and our eyes pool of rain. We do not know whether we are still alive._ ”

 

    Erich Maria Remarque, in ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’

  
  
  


The cries of help were still ringing in his ears.

 

Chaotic images would flash before his eyes every time he dared to close them. Even though they’d come and go quickly in a dream-like sequence, the details lingered.

 

Terror.

 

Desperation.

 

Confusion.

 

Blood stained faces, mouths and nostrils covered by grey dust, contorted in agony and fright.

 

People coughed and struggled to breathe.

 

A dense fog had swallowed them whole.

 

People looked like lost ghosts, barely standing on their feet, walking aimlessly, dazed.

 

Childlike cries echoed all around. People asking for help. Those who weren’t severely injured roamed the station calling for their loved ones. The dead were lined up by the rails, and the police were trying to keep the survivors from turning up their faces or checking their pockets to see if they could identify a friend, a sibling, a son or daughter. The pleads of doctors and nurses for them to step away went mostly unheard or ignored.

 

He had run straight towards the platforms after the bomb had gone off. He had tried to help, as had the other uninjured. Most of them had probably been soldiers during the global war. They had known what to do and how to act until the police and the ambulances arrived, and they had continued to help afterwards.

 

He had hurt himself, his hands, trying to help. Two big cuts ran across both palms. They were bleeding profusely, and he kept on cleaning them on his suit, his dress shirt, his pants. He had cuts on his arms, too, and on his knees.

 

By the end of the day, he was covered in blood. The worst part was that it wasn't only his. For the most part, the blood was someone else's.

 

The last two victims he had tried to help bad been a little girl’s and her brother.They couldn’t have been more than five or six years old each. Maybe the girl had been seven. He'd never know.

 

The boy was already dead when he had got to them, but his sister had refused to let go of his cold, motionless hand. She had died in Jack's arms later, on his lap, while a nurse tended to her. Her hand had been still tightly clutching her brother's.

 

The nurse had had to talk him into letting go of the girl’s limp body so they could take it with the rest. He had prayed that the kids’ mother weren't one of those women desperately looking for their children, falling on her knees when they recognized their babies among the dead. He had wished the poor woman had been one of the dead, too.

 

He found himself walking aimlessly around the station, ignoring one or two doctors that approached him and asked that he got those cuts looked at.

 

A child had died in his arms. There was nothing about his flesh and bones he wished a doctor took a look at.

 

He had a taste in his mouth he had had many times before. It was one that he remembered too well from his days as a soldier. Salty, and bitter, and metallic.

 

It was the taste of death.

 

He collapsed on the sidewalk outside the train station. He just sat there, eyes unfocused, elaborated breathing. He didn't know nor cared what time it was. The world around him was still there, tragic and chaotic and terribly loud, but for the time being he didn't feel like he belonged there, or anywhere else for that matter. For a fraction of a second he wondered why he couldn't be in the place of that child whose lifeless body would soon be taken to the morgue with the others.

 

That child had died in his arms while she held onto her dead brother's tiny hand. Both kids’ faces bad been dusty and bloody. He had tried to clear her mouth and nostrils from the dust so she could breathe.

 

He wished he could have saved her. He wished he could have traded places with her, whoever that little girl had been.

 

“Detective Robinson?”

 

He thought he heard someone calling his name. He wasn't sure. He wasn't completely aware of his surroundings. He was tired, and so weak, and he was having terrible chest pains.

 

“Detective Inspector Jack Robinson?”

 

He looked up. There was a red-headed woman standing in front of him, a suitcase in her hand. She looked worried and exhausted, her disheveled aspect couldn't be any better than his. She still had a stethoscope hanging around her neck.

 

It was Dr. Elizabeth McMillan, the Honourable Phryne Fisher’s best friend.

  
  



	3. Chapter 3

“ _For a young man who had a long and worthwhile future awaiting him, it was not easy to expect death almost daily. However, after a while I got used to the idea of dying young. Strangely, it had a sort of soothing effect and prevented me from worrying too much. Because of this I gradually lost the terrible fear of being wounded or killed_.”

 

German war-volunteer Reinhold Spengler

 

She had been having tea with Aunt Prudence when she heard the news. Someone from the board of directors at the hospital had called Mrs. Stanley's house. A bomb had gone off and over fifty people had died, and almost a hundred were injured and in need of medical assistance. The hospital was working at its full capacity, and volunteers were welcome.

 

The Honourable Phryne Fisher had experience as a nurse. She had been one during the war; she had driven an ambulance all around Paris while learning on the job, as well. She had seen wounded soldiers, had heard them cry out for their loved ones- their sweethearts, their mothers, and a boy had once cried for another man he had secretly loved but only dared talk about in his final moments. Most of them had passed away in her arms, right before her eyes. She knew what had to be done and how to do it, and she'd never been one to stay at home quietly. Not when there was a world of chaos out there waiting on people that were brave enough to do something about it.

 

They had left the house in a hurry and she had driven the Hispano-Suiza to the hospital. Aunt Prudence had complained all the way, and she'd even asked her niece if she'd been such a reckless driver during the war. She thought of telling her aunt the truth: she had been even more reckless in the war. But she decided against it- Mrs. Stanley was already too alarmed by how she drived _now_ , she didn't need scolding for how she'd used to drive in Paris.

 

She had wanted to go straight to where she was needed the moment she had parked the car, but her aunt had insisted she accompanied her to talk to some members of the board first. She had tried to explain that she saw no point in wasting her time like that. It was among the wounded that she could make herself useful. But Mrs. Prudence Stanley was a woman with selective hearing, so every word had fallen on deaf ears. Phryne had reluctantly agreed to go with her aunt for five minutes to get her off her back, then she'd go see how she could help.

 

So now she was in some boring room at the top floor of the hospital building away from what _really_ mattered. She had been polite enough and let her aunt introduce her to everyone she thought important and influential. She had made small talk about the events, heard them all go _Oh it's so terrible_ and _What a tragedy, what a tragedy indeed!_ And then _What kind of monster would do something like that! They deserve to hang!_ But the promised five minutes were up, and enough was enough. She wanted to leave now, go help the nurses, be of assistance. Two bombs had gone off, so if her aunt wanted to show her around for longer than five minutes then she had picked the wrong time.

 

She was about to excuse herself when someone she did know and was actually glad to see entered the room.

 

“Mac!” Phryne exclaimed, and her aunt's friends- and Mrs. Stanley herself- stopped talking mid sentence to look at her.

 

Not caring what anyone thought, she went to greet Mac with a kiss on the cheek. The doctor looked tired and distress, disheveled even.

 

They stepped out of the room and stayed in the corridor, where they could talk more freely.

 

“Phryne! I telephoned your house! Dot told me you were at your aunt's. When I telephoned you there, her maid told me you'd be here. I asked around and they told me you have come up here with your aunt and some members of the board…”

 

“I was having tea with Aunt Prudence when we heard. This is terrible, Mac! They say the dead count is over seventy now. Who could have done such a thing? Two bombs denotations at Flagstaff Gardens in the middle of the day!”

 

Mac’s expression changed suddenly. If it had been dark before, now it was even darker.

 

“You only know about the bombs in Flagstaff Gardens?” The doctor asked Phryne.

 

“Yes… When the board of directors called Aunt Prudence, after she hung up with them she only mentioned Flagstaff Gardens. She was in such a state after she heard the news that she could barely speak coherently, though. She could have misunderstood some of the information. Have there been other bombings?”

 

She knew the answer before Mac told her, of course, but that didn't make it any easier to hear.

 

“Another two bombs went off, that we know of. Platforms 4 and 5 at Flinders Street railway station.”

 

“It can't be a coincidence” Phryne said, her thoughts running a mile a minute. “Four bombs go off in two of the most busy public places in Melbourne, two at the same time in each place. Something big is going on.”

 

Her mind went straight to Detective Inspector Jack Robinson, whom she had last seen two months ago. If she wanted to investigate this, then their paths would most likely cross. She had managed to work cases- and very interesting ones, in fact- without interacting with him even once. She wished things remained that way, she did not want to see him. But she had to be realistic: she also wanted to solve this, find out who was behind it and why. She wouldn't stay at home while others worked this case simply because of _him_. She was sure he would like that now, wouldn't he? Well, she wouldn't give him the satisfaction. Besides, if she was smart enough and played her cards well, maybe she wouldn't even have to hear from him or see him at all.

 

“I was sent there to assist the injured.” Mac informed her. “Some of us got sent there, and some others went to Flagstaff Gardens. There was a thirty minute time-gap between both bombings- Flagstaff Gardens was first. Those that were still getting ready to go there got sent to the train station instead. It was terrible, Phryne. I haven’t seen anything like it since the war.”

 

“I can only imagine” Phryne said, a concerned expression on her face. It was unbelievable, what some people were capable of doing to others. “So you just got back from Flinders Street station, then?”

 

“Yes, and I telephoned your house the minute I got here. And then I tried to reach you at your aunt’s.”

 

“I’ll start investigating right away, Mac”

 

“I didn’t telephone you to let you know about the bombings so you could begin an investigation.” Mac said. “Although I was sure you'd want to start one.”

 

Phryne looked at her with a puzzled expression on her face.

 

“Then what did you want to talk about?”

 

“Detective Inspector Robinson was at the station when the bombs went off. He was waiting in line to buy a train ticket, apparently.”

 

Her heart skipped a beat, and then it began pounding furiously against her ribs. It hurt, and breathing was proving to be difficult. She didn’t want it to show, didn’t want Mac to know it, but the thought of Jack hurt tore her apart.

 

“How is he? Is he among the injured?”

 

She hoped he was, for if he wasn’t then it meant he was among the dead. And she refused to think about that possibility. He couldn’t be dead. He couldn’t have gone and got himself killed, not when their relationship was at an impasse. They hadn’t seen each other in two months, hadn’t spoken to each other or heard from the other. That couldn't be _it_ , right? He couldn’t be dead.

 

“He isn’t badly injured.”

 

Phryne breathed a sigh of relief.

 

“He wasn’t near the centre of the explosion. He got injured helping others, but nothing too serious. Just a few wounds, nothing too bad. He is shocked, though.” And then, as if she wasn’t sure it was her place to say it, she added: “Two young siblings, a boy and a girl, died in his arms. He had been trying to help them.”

 

She tried not to think about what Jack must have felt in that moment, while he had been holding the dying children in his arms. The war had taken a toll on them all, she knew that firsthand, but she imagined that to witness the death of a child had to be worse than any experience in the trenches.

 

“Did you take a look at his injuries?”

 

“He’s fine, Phryne” Mac reassured her. “But the shock was yet to wear off when I left him.”

 

“That would be an understatement.” Phryne said. “Have you sent him home? Or did he run back to the Police Station?” She could see Jack wanting to start working on the case right away.

 

“He is here. He rode to the hospital with me. We managed to track down the children’s mother. She didn’t die, she’s in surgery as we speak. The husband should arrive any minute now. Jack wanted to speak to him. He said he deserves to know that his children weren’t alone when… well, when it happened.”

 

“It doesn’t surprise me to hear that he does. I wouldn’t have expected different from him.” Phryne admitted.

 

Mac stayed silent for a moment. She looked like she was trying to work up the courage to say something, and Phryne could have sworn she knew exactly what was on the doctor’s mind.

 

“I think you should go downstairs and see him.”

 

“I am not on speaking terms with him, Mac, you know that. I haven’t seen him in two months. He made it clear that he doesn’t want to have anything to do with me. He doesn’t want me in his life.”

 

“Come on, Phryne! Don’t be so damn proud!”

 

She never got a chance to answer, for a young nurse approached Mac in a rather hurried fashion, eager to deliver a message from a fellow doctor.

 

“Dr. McMillan, I've been sent up here to get you.” The nurse said.

 

“Whatever is the matter, Angela?” Mac asked.

 

“It’s about the man you came in with, doctor,” at these words Phryne's throat closed and the blood in her veins froze. “He threw up and then passed out. Dr. Barnes saw him and decided he needed to be admitted to the hospital. He asked me to find you and let you know, said you knew him”

 

“Yes, I do. I do know him.” Mac said. “Thank you, Angela. I'll be right down.” Then she turned to Phryne: “Are you swallowing your pride and coming with me? Or are you too scared you'll choke on it?”


	4. Chapter 4

_“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places."_

Ernest Hemingway

 

The day had started like any other for her. She didn’t like routines, she didn’t follow them- she saw no point in them, they lacked spontaneity and didn’t go well with the insatiable hunger for adventure that she had. Mysteries and plot twist and all things thrilling weren’t routinary things. Routines were boring, and predictable, and ordinary, and those were all adjectives she didn’t wish her name to be in the same sentence as, _ever_. So she woke up anytime she fancied, like she had done that morning, and she took it from there. It was unlikely for her to know _exactly_ how her day would go, and she liked it that way because it meant that by the end of it she either could have bedded a gorgeous, foreign lion tamer or she could have found herself investigating the robbery of invaluable jewelry from a safe-deposit box an old socialité had hidden in his house behind a XVI century painting that hung in the library, but the painting would turn out to be a very good copy- but a copy, nonetheless-, and she’d discover that the old socialité was a wanted art forger… The possibilities were endless, and that was why she loved the way she lived her life so much. That was why she could never, would never, give any of it up.

 

She had solved her last case a couple of days ago (a sordid business scandal, it had made the papers). She hadn’t taken on new cases yet. April 25th wouldn’t be anything special, or so it had seemed at first. She had promised her aunt that they’d have tea at her house. It wasn’t an exciting prospect, but she did care about her aunt and it had been awhile since she had accepted an invitation to tea. And it would only be a couple of hours. Phryne could manage Aunt Prudence for a couple of hours. Maybe she’d go out dancing later that night, find herself a lover and fall asleep long after sunrise, exhausted from sex.

 

But then that telephone call had happened. She had gone to the hospital with her aunt, and then she had seen Mac and spoken to her… And April 25th had no longer been a day destined for tea with her aunt in the afternoon and dancing, drinking and shagging in the night.

 

Four bombs in total had gone off at two very crowded public places, and the population of Melbourne was now in panic. There were hundreds of dead, and hundreds of wounded, and the hospitals were understaffed. Others like her- women that had joined ambulance units during the war- had heard the news and offered their help. There was a lot to be done and not enough people doing it. Every second counted. Every pair of hands counted.

 

So naturally, she had told Mac she didn’t have time to go see Detective Inspector Jack Robinson. Not when there were children, and men, and women that had been having an ordinary day, catching the train or taking a stroll at the park, and now lay in a hospital bed, fighting for their lives and grieving the loved ones they had lost. Pride had nothing to do with it. Or maybe it did: maybe she prided herself on being someone who cared deeply for others and stretched a helping hand when needed. And at the moment, she was needed where she could do something useful, something that mattered. She also prided herself on respecting people and their choices, and Jack had chosen to write her out of his life: as his partner, as his friend, as his whatever-she-had-meant to him. He wanted nothing to do with her and her recklessness; he had made that clear before he walked out the door. She wouldn’t make matters worse for him (what was the word he had used? Oh, right: _unbearable_ ) by imposing herself. He hadn’t asked to see her. He knew where she lived and how to contact her should he wish to do so, but he hadn’t. So why would she have any reason to believe that he’d appreciate her presence while he recovered from his shock?

 

She had gone straight to ask how she could make herself useful, and then she had spent several hours helping the hospital nurses, cleaning up wounds and changing bandages, feeding patients soup and ice chips. Phryne had gone there to do those things. They were more important than Jack throwing up and passing out, which if you asked her were totally expectable reactions after the events of the day. She herself had felt like throwing up a couple of times, the memories of the war more overwhelming and vivid than they had been in years. But she had kept a clean head and she had focused on helping the nurses. That had been her number one priority.

 

Once reinforcements from other hospitals near Melbourne arrived, she’d go home and try to get some sleep so she could rise early the following morning to begin her investigation on the bombings. Phryne’s priorities regarding this particular case ended there. Detective Inspector Jack Robinson wasn’t on her list of priorities because he had proved that she wasn’t in his.

 

It was almost midnight when Phryne was ready to leave. She was tired and her feet were sore, and she had had a headache for the last half an hour. Her mouth was dry and she noticed that her hands were trembling slightly. Phryne hadn’t wanted to stop tending to the wounded to eat, or go to the bathroom, or drink a glass of water. She had insisted on covering for some of the novice nurses so they could freshen up and get some air. Those girls had to be Dot’s ages, maybe one or two years older, but not more. They hadn’t seen the horrors of a war, they didn’t fully know the extent of human cruelty yet. Some of them had been overwhelmed, others a little bit stunned- overall, they had been shocked. She had talked to them and tried to comfort them, had told them what a wonderful, brave thing they were doing and how important their work was for the injured and their loved ones.

 

Phryne hadn't allowed herself a minute to think or feel anything. She had concentrated on what had to be done, she had even comforted others, but she hadn't dealt with any emotions of her own. The memories had been there, but she hadn't allowed herself to be swallowed up by the dark, bottomless abyss. War flashbacks weren't easy to overcome, but she had managed. She had set her mind on what was important and ignored everything else.

 

But now that she had finished at the hospital and was ready to head back home, she wasn't sure she could keep on running from the flashbacks and the memories, both from what she had seen in the war and what she had seen that day. They weren't paralyzing, but they unsettled her. She knew she wouldn't sleep well that night, knew that she'd probably toss and turn and wake up several times. She considered getting herself a distraction, but she felt so exhausted she wouldn't enjoy it, and whatever man she found and took to her bed wouldn't enjoy himself much either. Besides, she didn’t know how welcomed a distraction would be at the moment. She had to wake up early the following morning: there were two bomb attacks to investigate, and she wanted to take part on the investigation.

 

Earlier that day, when she had first heard about what had happened, she had thought that if she was smart enough and played her cards well, then she would be able to work on this case without having to interact with Jack. She had known that their paths would likely cross at some point if she were to investigate this, but she had opted to do something she rarely did and lied to herself: of course she would be able to beat the odds and not hear from him or see him even once if she didn’t want, and _she didn’t want to_. She had learned that he had been at the train station when the bombs had gone off, that two _children_ had died in his arms when he had been trying to assist them, and she still hadn’t wanted to see him. Mac had told her he was shocked and had some minor wounds, and she still hadn’t wanted to see him. A nurse had informed them he had thrown up and then passed out, and Phryne hadn’t even considered for a moment her friend’s idea that she had to ‘swallow down’ her pride and go see him. Throwing up, passing out, those were normal reactions, they weren’t unheard of after what he had gone through. Other people had needed her more, whereas he didn’t need her in his life at all (his choice, not hers).

 

When she walked out of the hospital, the stillness of the night echoed inside her head. The adrenaline that had driven her for the last few hours was beginning to drain out. The silence was a sharp contrast to how loud the hospital ward had been. Once she was inside her car, seated in front of the wheel, she didn’t start the engine. She felt dizzy. She supposed the events of the day were finally catching up on her. She had no place to run away from the dark, bottomless abyss now.

 

She wouldn’t admit it to anyone, and she’d even go as far as denying she had admitted it to herself, but she did miss Jack. She cared about him. Given the chance, she would prefer to have him in her life. But she wasn’t one to go after anyone, just like she wasn’t one to expect anyone to go after her. She hadn’t asked him to change or give up anything of what he was- she would never do that. She hadn’t told him how unbearable it was for her to want to fuck him, how frustrated it made her that she’d never share a gaudy night with him because he wasn’t the type of man that had casual sex. She had never felt she had a right to tell him she wished to not see him anymore because he wasn’t likely to change his views on relationships and sex for her. She had simply respected that they thought different about it, that she found freedom and pleasure in habits that were mortifying to him and that he’d never adopt. She had never rubbed on his face how much he was missing out because he chose to repress his instincts and desires for the sake of propriety and moral. She had been all for dealing with their differences, but he hadn’t. He had walked out on her the minute he had run into complex, tangled feelings when he’d least expected it.

 

It hurt, and it angered her that it did. She had _seen_ real hurt throughout the course of her life, she knew what _real hurt_ was- she had lost a sister and joined an ambulance unit during the Great War, for God’s sake!-, and there was no logical reason for this to give her such grieve. She couldn’t believe she had allowed this man to get under her skin and hurt her with his choice to not want to see her anymore. She shouldn’t be hurt that he found her recklessness to be _unbearable_.

 

They had become friends. He had been annoyed by her a little at first, but the exasperation hadn’t lasted long, and they had forged a friendship. He had been there with her when she went to the place Foyle had buried Janey, and then later when she had asked him to help her celebrate he had stayed. And before that, he had gone to Guy and Isabella’s party- even though he had been dealing with his divorce at the time- because she had told him she needed him to remind her she had no reason to be afraid of shadows. They had shared nightcaps, and laughs, and games of draughts, and she had thought he was her friend. She had been mistaken in thinking it went both ways, because it was obvious now that he hadn’t considered her a friend. You don’t do to friends what he had done to her. You’re supposed to care for your friends, and you don’t push out of your life the people you care about. The way she saw it, it was as simple as that: she had cared more about Jack as a person than she ever did about Jack as a potential lover. When she had realized that the idea of him in her bed would never be more than a fantasy for the nights she spent alone touching herself, she had accepted that and moved on. She had been happy to have what he had to offer. The same couldn’t be said for him.

 

He hadn’t been happy with what she had to offer. He was smart enough to know she’d never change unless she truly wished to do so (and that was as likely to happen as him taking on lovers for the fun of it). Apparently, her presence in his life had started to cause him feelings that were very hard to deal with, so _Sayonara Miss Fisher!_

 

She knew she shouldn’t have, knew that he didn’t deserve it, but she missed him. And yes, maybe she was still sitting there in the Hispano-Suiza because she didn’t want to go home yet. A part of her wanted to get out of the car, walk back to the hospital and see him. She was having trouble writing him out of her life. She had meant what she’d said to Mac: she considered the doctors and nurses tending to the badly injured had needed her more than Jack. But now that that was over, well, she had nowhere else to run to, nowhere else to hide from these thoughts and emotions. She still wanted him in her life, she missed him, she wanted to see him. She didn’t beg for anyone, never had begged for anyone a single day of her life, and she would definitely not beg Jack. But she couldn’t believe how hard it was to bury him in the past.

 

She tapped her fingers on the wheel absentmindedly. If she did go to see him, would she find him asleep? She doubted anyone could sleep without a helping hand from the doctors after a day like that. Most patients usually had to be sedated, and she supposed that had been the case with him. He must have been under a lot of stress, with the bombings first and helping at the scene, and then those children dying and their father arriving at the hospital and hearing the news… She shuddered just thinking about it.

 

Phyne would have betted her Hispano-Suiza on this: he felt ill after talking with the father. She wondered if he blamed himself. Some would say it was ridiculous, of course: he wasn’t to blame, he hadn’t planted the bombs. You couldn’t just force yourself to reasonably acknowledge that you did everything you could have done. You had to accept that what happened, happened. Oh, yes, you were lucky and blessed that the worst that could have happened had eluded you! No, it didn’t work like that. The soldiers that had made it back home were usually tortured by memories of those that hadn’t, and some even found difficult to understand what had set them apart, what made them so special that they had lived but their mates had died.

 

She supposed it would be logical for Jack to be feeling like that after the bombing. He hadn’t been in the ratio of the explosion, but what if it had happened five minutes later? And what if he had got to those children sooner? And what if he had done this or that differently?

 

She was familiar with how surviving something others hadn’t could make you feel. Phryne had spent years feeling guilty over Janey going missing, asking herself questions like _Why wasn’t I taken?_ or _Why did it happen to her?_ or _What makes me special? Why is she dead and I am not? Why do I get to live and she didn’t?_ And then several years later, upon learning the truth, every now and then she would find herself pondering this question: _Why did my stupid father have to write in the wrong date on the birth certificate?_

 

It never stopped. It became less frequent with time, yes, but it never really stopped. It was the same with the war flashbacks, she was sure Jack would agree with her on that if she asked him. It would be the same with the memories of that day.

 

Phryne sighed. She really had to bring herself to start the engine and drive home. She was tired, and she needed whatever sleep she could get, even if she knew beforehand that it wouldn’t be much and that she’d probably be tired in the morning. The problem was that at this point she didn’t know what would be more upsetting: flashbacks of the injuries and the pain she had seen at the hospital ward, or the images of Jack Robinson alone in a hospital bed with no one to remind him to not be afraid of shadows that were already coming up in her mind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would like to thank the wonderful @MissingMissFisher and @Fire_Sign for their help. The quote at the beginning was suggested by @MissingMissFisher when I discussed this chapter with her.


	5. Chapter 5

_ “Only the dead have seen the end of war.” _

 

George Santayana, Spanish-American philosopher.

  
  
  


The detective inspector was discharged from hospital the following morning. They had asked him how he’d spent the night, and he had said he’d been fine. He didn’t mention the nightmares he’d had or how restless he’d started to feel a couple of hours before dawn, when the effects of the sedative they’d given him had begun to wear off. They had also asked him how he felt physically, and he’d muttered he was all right although he wasn’t- he still had that nauseous sensation running up and down his throat, acidic and repulsive, burning his insides. And he felt empty, too, like someone had taken out every single organ and replaced it with a heavy nothingness (if that was even logical.) He didn’t speak about that, either.

 

He didn’t want to speak about anything.

 

He had felt that way once before, several years ago, when he had been fresh off from the trenches and supposedly ready to pick up where he had left off before boarding that ship to France. He hadn’t wanted to talk about the things he’d seen and done. People had stopped asking questions, eventually, and he’d learned that if he wanted them to back off he had to lie to them, tell them this thing was one thing and this other thing was even better. Whether because they believed you or because they got tired of being lied at, people usually backed off with time. 

 

(Even Miss Fisher had eventually backed off. He had walked away from her life and she hadn’t followed him. She hadn’t shown up at the station, or at his home. She hadn’t called. He hadn’t been wanting or waiting those things, of course not. It was just an example of how right his theory was: people eventually left you alone to deal with your thoughts and feelings. No one stayed around that long pushing you for something you weren’t willing to give to them. And that was the what he wanted. He didn’t want anyone picking at his brain and heart, dissecting them, examining them. He didn’t want anyone trying to fix them.)

 

He went home to shower and change into a fresh set of clothes. The ones he had been wearing the day before would have to be thrown away. He wouldn’t have kept them even if they could have been properly cleaned and mended. They would now forever be tainted by death and chaos, no matter how much one could try to scrub off the blood and mud stains with soap and water. 

 

(As the hot water cascaded down on him, he remembered a time in his life where he had felt so broken and so terribly undeserving of his ‘survivor’ status that he’d often cried every time he showered. He’d cried until his eyes were bloodshot red, until he was out of breath and shaking violently. He’d never thought he’d ever experience that again. And yet there he was that morning.)

 

He threw up once more before he left for the police station. His stomach was still unsettled. He himself was still unsettled. He couldn’t forget the expression the father of those two children had had when he had been informed of his son and daughter passing. The man had been devastated, had practically gone mad with the pain of his loss. Jack had seen people react like that before. He had seen it in his line of work, he had seen it when he’d been a soldier. But dead men killed in the line of duty or in the trenches were one thing, and two small children dead in a bomb attack was another. The policemen and the soldiers knew what they were getting themselves into. They knew there was a chance they wouldn’t make it back home. He himself left his home every day knowing that there was a chance he would not make him back. Those children and their mum, they hadn’t imagined the horror that was awaiting them at the train station that day. 

 

He couldn’t stop imagining how the day had begun for that family. He wondered if they had had breakfast together one last time. They couldn’t have known the children would die later that day, of course they couldn’t. He wondered if the father had kissed them on their foreheads before he left for work. If the mother had something special planned for dinner that night. He wondered what games the siblings had liked to play together, and if they had had one last chance to play them. 

 

He couldn’t shake those thoughts off his mind. He tried, but he really could not. It was something he had struggled a lot with those first years after the war had ended- he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about what the loved ones of those dead men had been thinking or planning or doing minutes before they received the terrible news. He couldn’t stop trying to guess what those men would have done if they had made it back home- which professions they would have chosen, if they would have gotten married, or if they would have gotten the chance to see the dreams they had come true. He sometimes thought of this other soldier, Harold, who had wanted to open up a bakery ever since he’d been a kid. It had been his dream ever since he could remembered, but that dream and the endless possibilities attached to it had died with him in the trenches.

 

And he, Jack, had lived.

 

The previous day had been the same: two children had died, and he had lived. Thousands had died, actually. Not in his arms, not while he held them, but they had died. And he had lived.

 

It had been excruciating, watching the father come undone, fall on his knees to the cold hospital floor and cry out like a wounded animal. The world of that man had ended right there on that spot. His dreams had shattered.

 

And Jack had felt himself emotionally collapse all over it, the broken pieces cutting him, digging under his skin.

 

The doctors had said his had been a 'normal reaction’, an 'expected reaction’. One of them had even asked him if he had served time in the army, and when Jack had simply gruntled that he had fought in the war the doctor had given him an understanding look. Jack had then called himself to silence, and the doctor had dropped the subject, given him a sedative and let him try to get some rest.

 

He had fallen asleep clutching the pillow, wondering if he would ever be able to actually put the war behind it, or if he would be always doomed to be triggered when something like this happened. He supposed it was an easy question to answer. It would never be over. It would only be over once he was dead. And yet he had once more outlived thousands of people on sheer luck and sheer luck only. 

 

He remembered he had often tried to separate himself mentally from situations that reminded him strongly of his time in the trenches and the horrors he'd witnessed there. He would usually focus on something, anything, until that single thing became everything it existed for him and his thoughts and surroundings started to blur until they disappeared. He hadn't had to do this for quite some time, but the previous night he has felt like he needed to, and so he had focused on the weight and feel of the white pillow until the meds had kicked in and he had fallen asleep for a couple of hours.

 

(He had woken up in the middle of the night, agitated, clothes damp with sweat. He had been disorientated at first, and then everything had come back to him in sharp, horrible flashes. After he had recognized the hospital room and before the pain of what had happened stabbed him in the stomach until he felt like throwing up again, his detecting skills had kicked in and he could have sworn there was something different in the air. He could have sworn it was _her_ _perfume_ he smelled. He had been quick to dismiss this as impossible, another sign that he was desperate to find anything that brought him comfort so he could grab onto it. The problem was she wasn't part of his life anymore, would never be again. So it had probably only been his mind playing cruel tricks on him, making him believe there was an oasis in the desert when in reality there wasn't much more than the nothingness he felt inside.)

 

He drove to the station mechanically. He tried to concentrate on the road, and the noises the car engine made, and not the people on the street with their weary, frightened faces. And not the memory of the woman he was trying to forget, or the fleeting idea that she could have gone visit him the night before and a trail of her perfume had been left behind for him to wake up to. He tried to push away the flashes from the day before that came back to haunt him, as well as other flashes that he wasn’t sure were of things that had happened 24 hours or several years ago in a blood stained foreign land. 

 

“Inspector, Sir.” Constable Collins greeted him in his usual, formal way. Jack noticed the young man looked tired and pale. He supposed it was in equal parts due to both the effect the chaos was having on all law enforcement departments and the nervousness it made him not knowing exactly how Jack wanted to be addressed after what had happened.

 

“Good morning, Collins. Fill me in, please,” Jack asked him, business-like. He was determined to not let this affect him more than it already had. He had to pull through the darkness that was trying to engulf him, for he’d be of not good if he fell into the despair and detachment he had once felt upon surviving bombings and battles and hails of bullets and explosions.

 

Constable Collins looked like he wanted to ask the inspector something, but he ultimately decided against it. He quickly gave him the details of the investigation Detective Inspector Walker was in charge of.

 

“We haven't found any leads yet, Sir,” the young constable told him. “Nor do we think the places they chose for the attacks are somehow linked by anything other than their being very crowded locations. We have intelligence and surveillance in all the big public places in Melbourne.”

 

Jack nodded his head in agreement. When they reached Detective Inspector Walker's  office, he thanked Collins for the information and then the young constable left. The senior inspectors of the City South Police Station then proceeded to meet for a debrief on the bombings case. 

 

“Robinson, how are you doing, mate?” Walker, a short man in his late forties with blonde hair and a robust body offered Jack his hand. “I heard you were at the train station following a lead on the guard's murder when it happened. They kept you overnight at the hospital?” 

 

“I am doing well now, Walker. Thank you.”

 

If the inspector had trouble believing Jack, he didn't let it show. He didn't ask about the children or their grieving father, and for that Jack was thankful. He didn’t want pity, he didn’t want people to say how sorry they were. Walker was a smart man who had seen his share of horrible things (he had been a soldier himself, after all, and he’d been serving as a policeman since longer before the war) and he probably understood what Jack wanted and needed at the moment wasn’t pity: he wanted to work and see what he could do in order to get the monsters behind the attacks before they could hurt more people.

 

As Walker was debriefing him on the situation, there were interrupted by a knock on the door.

 

“Yes, come in,” Walker called.

 

Constable Collins entered the small office, that wasn’t much different from Jack’s own. Once again he looked a little bit paler than usual, and he stammered a little like he often did when talking with his senior detective about topics he knew would make him uncomfortable. 

 

“Inspector Walker, Sir. Inspector Robinson, Sir, I apologise for the interruption.”

 

“Whatever is the matter, Collins?” Detective Walker was quick to ask, the pen he had been using to mark in a map to show Jack the high profile public places where they had sent security and surveillance teams held in her mouth between his teeth.

 

“I’m sorry, sirs.” Constable Collins apologised again, and Jack noticed how anxious the young man looked. “There is someone at the front desk asking to see the inspector in charge of the bombings investigations. That would be you, Sir,” he added, nervously nodding his head to Detective Walker. 

 

“Did they say what for, Collins?” 

 

“When the newspaper got delivered to their home this morning, they found a typewritten note slipped inside it,” the stammering got a little bit worse now “in the page where they mentioned that some of the victims had been children” Jack noticed the young constable was looking anywhere but his eyes.

 

Both detectives got to their feet immediately. 

 

“What did the note say?” Walker said, walking all the way around his desk and towards the door.

 

“It was a nursery rhyme, Sir. A very upsetting one, if you ask me.”

 

“Did they bring the note with them?” Jack asked.

 

“Yes, Sir. In a plastic bag, Sir. And they were careful to handle it with gloves as to not contaminate the evidence.”

 

“Good, good.” Walker said. “Take them into an interrogation room, Collins. We’ll need to talk to them, make sure this isn’t some cruel joke someone’s playing on them, or on us.”

 

“Yes, Sir. I will, Sir.” Then, he took a deep breath and, doing his best to put in use whatever courage he could muster, he addressed Jack and added “: I think you will be wanting to join Inspector Walker in the interrogation room, Sir. The person that found the note inside their newspaper is Miss Phryne Fisher”.


	6. Chapter 6

" _Patriots always talk of dying for their country, and never of killing for their country._ ”

 

British philosopher Bertrand Russell

 

She’d risen from bed by mid-morning, a string of curses muttered under her breath upon realizing she’d overslept. It had been a difficult night- she had gotten to bed at almost two in the morning, and then she’d tossed and turned trying to push away the memories, the thoughts, the bad dreams. By the time subconscious flashes of explosions, wounded soldiers and ambulance sirens had subdued, it had been almost six. She’d fallen into uninterrupted sleep then, and by the time she heard Dot calling on the door it was half past ten.

 

She had showered and dressed quickly, said no to Dot’s offer of a full breakfast and decided to keep it simple: some toast and a nice cup of tea would have to do nicely. She’d sat at the kitchen table where Cec and Bert had already been enjoying tea and fresh scones, checking in on the latest horse races in the newspaper.

 

“Do you want to take a look at the paper, Miss?” Bert had asked. “It just got delivered ten minutes before you came down.”

 

“Yes, something about printing taking longer than usual, what with everything that happened, must have had a lot to write about,” had added the other cabbie.

 

“The edition must have been closed very late, indeed,” had commented Mr. Butler.

 

Then, Cec had passed her newspaper sections they had barely touched, only interested as they had been in finding out if the equine they’d bet on had finished first. News on the bombing attacks were all over the front page, big headlines announcing the horrors that had shaken the city they day before: two crowded places attacked with two bombs each, hundreds of dead, fear and uncertainty in the population.

 

Phryne had mentally cursed at herself for (albeit unintentionally) sleeping in. She should have been up first thing in the morning, no matter how little sleep she’d gotten the night before, no matter how close to exhaustion her body might have been feeling. She certainly hadn’t been feeling any better in spite of the couple hours of sleep she’d gotten, so what difference could it have made if she had been up and about by seven, like she had planned the night before? She should have started following investigation paths and finding clues.

 

When she’d accepted the newspaper from Cec, she had had no idea clues were about to _find her._

 

She had asked the cabbies to drive her to City South Police Station the moment she had found the typewritten note someone had slipped into the fifth page, where there was an article on the number of victims that had been children. Both Flagstaff Garden and Flinders Street had been full of families, mothers with their little kids going about their days, completely unaware of the terrible fate that had been awaiting them. Totally ignorant that those moments would be their last.

 

She had taken the creamy colored paper with a napkin and placed it on a plastic bag, careful not to smudge the black ink that looked, in fact, as fresh as the recently printed paper’s. Once in the Police Station, she’d explained the reason behind her visit to Constable Hugh Collins (who, conveniently, had happened to be at the front desk the moment she’d arrived), and had been told to wait while he informed the inspector in charge of the case, Detective Inspector Walker.

 

She was sitting in the interrogation room, where Hugh had taken her after speaking with his superior, the plastic bag with the note on the table in front of her. Phryne felt impatient and anxious, and at the same time she couldn’t help but experience the thrill that came with every mystery she found herself aching to solve.

 

The only thing that she’d be missing in this big one case, it seemed, would be her usual partner.

 

 _His choice, not mine_ , she thought. _He walked out on us, I didn’t. He was the one that gave me up. I wouldn’t have done that. He was my friend. Friends don’t give up on each other._

 

And yet she had been to see him the night before. A last moment’s decision, she had stepped out of the car and walked back inside the hospital, found his room and sneaked in to see him, if only briefly. He had been asleep, thanks to the sedatives they had surely given him earlier, and she hadn’t lingered there more than a couple of minutes. A part of her had had the need to see for herself that he was, in fact, all right after the events of the day That he was still alive, whole, breathing. Battered and scarred and probably scared, terribly wounded and mentally tormented by past shadows and war flashbacks, calmed and restful only because of the medication the doctors had administered, but still Detective Inspector Jack Robinson nonetheless.

 

 _Her_ Inspector Detective Jack Robinson, even if he had given that up. Even if he had walked away. Even if she was furious at him, and hurt, and mad, and the anger was so great she felt like screaming when she thought about how things had ultimately turned out between them because he had found some of his feelings unbearable. Even with all of that, she had realized the night before, as she watched his face only lit by the moonlight that filtered through the room’s windows, that she still thought of him as _hers_ . Her detective inspector, her partner, her friend. _Her Jack_.

 

And that couldn’t be good, now, could it?

 

No, it definitely couldn’t.

 

It wasn’t good that she was having so much trouble letting go.

 

Letting _him_ go.

 

She hoped this case would take her mind off the emotions that were disturbing her, those about a certain police officer with a love for Shakespeare and baked goods. She wanted to see justice served, find the culprits and see them hang. Hundreds had died the day before in those attacks! They had to be stopped before they could hurt more people, end more innocent lives. They had to be imprisoned before they could destroy more families. The lives that had already been lost wouldn’t be back, but at least they’d pay the price and they wouldn’t keep on causing any more pain. They’d terrorize no one else-  because if anything at the moment (and she knew this because she had lived through the Great War and had seen its effects on people’s everyday lives) the Melbourne population had to be _terrorized_.

 

It was with great surprise that she saw a robust man she didn’t know- Detective Inspector Walker, she presumed- walk into the interrogation room in the company of a man she _did_ know. In fact, she had seen his sleeping form on an  a hospital bed less than twenty four hours before.

 

Detective Inspector Jack Robinson, it seemed, had been discharged from the hospital earlier that day, and he was already up and about serving his position as an officer of the law.

 

“Miss, I believe we haven’t met. I am Inspector Walker”

 

“Miss Phryne Fisher, lady detective.”

 

She rose to her feet and shook Walker’s hand. Then, the man in the light brown suit sat down in one of the chairs in front of her. Jack occupied the other.

 

“You have met Inspector Robinson, of course” Walker said.

 

“Yes, we know each other” Phryne said, while Jack simply gave a nod of the head. “How do you do, Jack?” she asked. And then, with the slightest hint of malice in her voice, she added: “Long time no see.”

 

“I am good, Miss Fisher. Thank you,” he answered, all business like. The atmosphere in the room was so tense one could have easily cut through it with a pair of sewing scissors. “How do you do?”

 

“Fine, thank you.”

 

“Well,” Walker interrupted the little wordless banter they were having only with their eyes. “Constable Collins informed us you found a note slipped inside the newspaper that was delivered to your house this morning.”

 

“Yes,” Phryne confirmed, pushing the plastic bag across the table so the detectives could examine its contents. “The ink was still fresh, so it can’t have been written long before the newspaper was delivered. I wasn’t present when the paperboy did so, my staff was. They say he apologized for the tardiness, but apparently due to the recents events we all are aware that the newspaper edition closed late, so the printing was delayed and subsequently so was the delivery.”

 

As she spoke, Phryne tried to focus on both Jack and Walker equally. She didn’t want him thinking she couldn’t be a professional about this. She _was_ a professional, and she knew he was one as well. If he felt he was good enough to be working, despite the fact that he looked older and more tired than she’d ever seen him, then great, she’d work with them both. Perhaps the day before she had been convinced she would have preferred not to cross paths with the inspector, but the truth was that he was there, as was she, and the case at hand and the potential evidence she had brought in with her were a lot more important than the bad blood between them.

 

This, and she was sure he’d agree with her, was bigger than them.

 

“Constable Collins said the note had been slipped in the same page where a sensitive matter was treated.” She noticed how careful Inspector Walker had worded the sentence, as if he was trying to avoid mentioning the dead children in order to spare Jack the emotional trigger. She also noticed how the latter of the two men didn’t seem to appreciate the gesture, for he immediately looked away from her and fixed his eyes on the floor for a few seconds before lifting his head up again. It surely had made him exposed, the care Walker had put in avoiding the direct mention of the dead kids. The older detective may as well have punched him in the gut and called him a sissy for the flash of humiliation his action caused to cross Jack’s features for a brief moment  

 

“The note was slipped inside a page that had an article of the youngest victims of the bomb attacks.” Phryne said, looking at Walker in the eyes. She knew very well Jack could handle it. And she knew that, even if he didn’t, he wouldn’t have wanted his weaknesses to be pointed at him. He wouldn’t have wanted to feel less than an equal in that room with her and the other inspector.

 

“Do you have any idea who could have slipped this note inside your copy of the newspaper, Miss Fisher?” he had asked, his voice firm and steady as it always was when interrogating a witness.

 

“No idea whatsoever, Inspector. I only noticed when I began to read the newspaper, and I got to that page.”

 

“And why do you think this note may have something to do with the attacks?” Inspector Walker asked.

 

“I am well known for consulting with City South Police Station on murder cases. I work as a private lady detective investigating criminal activities and the likes of them. Some of the cases I’ve worked on and successfully solved have made the papers. Whoever sent this note, which once you read it you  will see just how unsettling it is, knew I would interpret it for what it is.”

 

“And what do you think it is, Miss Fisher?” Walker asked.

 

“A provocation. A warning. They think this is a game. They’re asking to be seeked. Perhaps they even want to be found.”

 

“How can you be sure the person that hid the note inside your newspaper isn’t just someone with a wicked sense of humor? How can you be so sure that they are the culprits, the responsible behind these bombing attacks?” It was Jack who spoke this time.

 

“Please take a look at the note,” Phryne said, feeling impatient all of a sudden. “Go on, take a look at the note” she insisted, making a gesture with her head to point the plastic bag where the folded typewritten note was still being kept.

 

With the utmost care, Detective Walker took the creamy colored paper and unfolded it. He and Jack proceeded to read the words that had been typed there, with Phryne sitting in front of them growing more and more restless with each tick of the clock:

 

 

 

> Orange and lemons,
> 
> Say the bells of St. Clement’s.
> 
>  
> 
> You owe me five farthings,
> 
> Say the bells of St. Martin’s.
> 
>  
> 
> When will you pay me?
> 
> Say the bells of Old Bailey.
> 
>  
> 
> When I grow rich,
> 
> Say the bells of Shoreditch.
> 
>  
> 
> When will that be?
> 
> Say the bells of Stepney.
> 
>  
> 
> I do not know,
> 
> Say the great bell of Bow.
> 
>  
> 
> Here comes a candle to light you to bed,
> 
> And here comes a chopper to chop off your head!
> 
> Chip chop chip chop the last man is dead!

 

“It’s an old nursery rhyme,” Walker said when he was finished. “My grandmother used to sing it to me and my siblings,” he commented. “Odd  woman, she was.”

 

“Some of the letters are highlighted with a pencil,” Jack observed.

 

“Yes,” Phryne said, satisfied that they had finally reached the point she was most interested in. “And look what phrase they form if you single them out.”

 

She took a piece of paper out her purse, one she had scribbled on back at Wardlow while she waited for Cec and Bert to get the motorcar ready. She hadn’t been surprised that the isolated words made sense when put together, for she was sure the real message wasn’t the nursery rhyme in itself, but the code hidden in plain sight so anyone could easily decipher it:

 

Phryne pushed the piece of paper across the table until both Jack and Inspector Walker could take a look at it.

 

In her messy handwriting, caked together and then separated by slashes when she had worked out the meaning,  it read:

 

_Come/and/stop/me/or/else._

 

“ _Come and stop me or else,_ ” Walker read out loud.

 

“So you still think this is the work of a joker?” she asked him. “Because I myself am inclined to think this was slipped inside my newspaper by the same mad person that made four bombs go off yesterday. This is the work of a homicidal maniac who thinks this is a game of hide and seek. He is daring me to find him before he causes more damage. Before he kills in mass again.”

 

“I agree with you, Miss Fisher,” Jack said, and then he turned to speak to Inspector Walker. “This is a lead worth following, don’t you think?”

 

“I don’t think there is anything of worth behind this,” Walker said, pointing a the note with a certain disdain. “Some kid at the neighborhood knows Miss Fisher here is a lady detective. They have a go at their father’s writing machine, type this up, hid it inside her newspaper, perhaps with the complicity of the delivery boy who may as well be a mate of theirs, and they have a laugh at her and the police. We have seen this before, Robinson.”

 

Jack spoke before Phryne did.

 

“I believe it would be a mistake not to investigate this further, Walker.”

 

Walker stood up, and at the same time so did Jack and Phryne. Apparently, the detective inspector had decided their talk was through.

 

“I’m afraid we don’t see eye to eye on this, Jack,” he said. “The city is on alert. We don’t know if there would be more bombings, we don’t know where these people could attack next. This,” he pointed at the note again “this is definitely a joke someone’s playing on Miss Fisher, and on us. It’s your problem if you believe it, but I don’t. I see it for what it is: a cruel joke. We have much more important matters at hand, don’t you think?”

 

“I am not underestimating the case or the terror the city is currently enduring after yesterday’s events,” Jack said, Phryne’s eyes on him the whole time. “But my instinct is telling me there’s something here, and so is Miss Fisher’s.” Then, after a small pause, he added: “I’ve worked with her. I’ve seen how her mind works. If she thinks there is something behind this, then it probably is. I trust her instinct as much as I trust mine.”

 

“Then by all means,” Walker said “You have my permission to work with your civilian consultor here. You want to investigate this note? Fine. Please, be my guest. I will work on finding leads that are convincing to me. Leads that don’t look like the work of a bored adolescent and their equally bored mates.”

  
And those were the last words Detective Inspector Walker said before he stepped out of the interrogation room closing the door as he left, leaving Jack and Phryne alone for the first time after their parting several months in the past.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The lovely, talented @MissingMissFisher proofread this chapter. She's always encouraging me to write more. She's always helping me become a better writer. If you haven't read her stories, I recommend that you do. She's everything a writer should be! 
> 
> I hope you have enjoyed this chapter. More to come soon!


	7. Chapter 7

“ _NO doubt they’ll soon get well; the shock and strain_ __  
_Have caused their stammering, disconnected talk._ __  
_Of course they’re ‘longing to go out again,’—_ __  
_These boys with old, scared faces, learning to walk._ __  
_They’ll soon forget their haunted nights; their cowed_ __  
_Subjection to the ghosts of friends who died,—_ __  
_Their dreams that drip with murder; and they’ll be proud_ __  
_Of glorious war that shatter’d all their pride..._ __  
_Men who went out to battle, grim and glad;_  
_Children, with eyes that hate you, broken and mad._ ”

 

Siegfried Sassoon

 

 

The curious thing about deafening silence is that sometimes it rings even louder and clearer than spoken words. It makes the air heavy and unbreathable, and the atmosphere so thick a knife could cut into it as easily as if it were a loaf of fresh bread. The weight of what’s been left unsaid exceeds that of the words exchanged between hostile parties, for in matters that face heart and mind, temperament and character against each other, it is what we choose to silence that defines the true nature of our feelings rather than the sentences we weave together in a frenzy and spit out.

 

The Honourable Phryne Fisher and Detective Inspector Jack Robinson remained submerged in deafening silence after Detective Inspector Walker left the interrogation room where the three of them had sat to discuss the typewritten note that had been slipped inside the copy of the newspaper delivered to the woman’s residence that morning. After the previous day’s events, one would have thought Inspector Walker wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss a disturbing note like the one Miss Fisher had shown him. And yet the older man had just done that. In his own words, he didn’t have time to waste on the cruel joke of a bored adolescent and his mates, for they weren’t sure whether the real person responsible behind the bombing attacks would strike again, and the city was in an understandable state of terror.

 

The other senior detective and his former, unofficial crime-solving partner thought differently, and they had told Walker so. They believed it was a lead worth following, and Walker had told them than if they were so convinced that was the case then the lead was theirs to follow. The detective in charge of the investigation had decided the note wasn’t worth _his_ time. But, he wouldn’t be opposed to Inspector Robinson looking more into it, if only because Inspector Walker was well known in City South for the pedagogical methods he used with other officers: _let them follow their gut_ , he’d say, _let them see where they’re wrong, learn by themselves so next time they’ll be wiser, better._ That was, according to him, how a police officer had to be trained. _That’s how you develop real skill in any work field: by making mistakes and learning from them,_ he had once said to Jack. Apparently, Walker was putting his theory to practice with Inspector Robinson and Miss Fisher by allowing them to chase after what he had concluded based on first impressions was not more than a kid trying to play a prank on the lady detective whose solved cases sometimes made the news.

 

So alone they were left, and the small interrogation room seemed all of a sudden much more smaller, and the oxygen they were sharing tainted and poisonous. They were sitting with a table in between them, and she was looking at the inspector as if daring him so speak first. _Come on Jack, you go first_ , her eyes were saying in a haunting, almost melodious voice. _You left first, Inspector, it’s only fair that you speak first now that we are alone together after all these months apart._ He understood this, of course. How could he not? He was naturally good at reading people, and as it turned out he was even better at reading _her_ , with her expressive eyes that had a language of their own in which he was so very well versed.

 

Jack recognized a dare when he saw it, especially if it came from Miss Fisher. The relationship they'd had before he walked away had been, from the very beginning, daring in its nature. _I dare you to stop me from sticking my nose in the Andrews’ case, Jack. I dare you to stop me from mentioning your name and your position in the Victoria Police Department so I’m granted access to crime scenes and information. I dare you to be like the modern, liberal men that I sleep with so I can have you without ruining our friendship. I dare you, Jack. I dare you._ She was like that, and Jack was sure that she saw life as a dare in itself, one adventure after the other, and each one more dangerous, more interest, more reckless than the one before. She stopped at nothing, whether because she didn’t let anything stop her or because she chose to clear obstacles out of her way and keep going nonetheless. Miss Fisher would never stop at a dare, Jack knew, and so she expected everyone she was surrounded by to abide to the same rules. For a mind like hers, life was but a game of dare.

 

He looked at her from his side of the table and remained silent, holding her gaze. He was there, as was she, and the matter at hand- the bombings, the victims, the wounded, the dead, the mysterious note typed and slipped inside the newspaper by an anonymous writer - was more important than whatever bad blood there was between them. He knew she would agree with him on that. That was why he had told Walker that he trusted her instinct as much as he trusted his own. That was why he had insisted the detective inspector let him investigate the note.

 

That was why she had stayed, it was why she was still there sitting right across the table from him.

 

A couple more seconds passed before one of their voices filled the silent room:

 

“So tell me, Inspector, do you think a talk with the newspaper hawker that made the delivery at my house this morning would be a good starting point for our side of the investigation?”

 

The other curious thing about deafening silence, you see, is that it gives just the right setting for wordless conversation. And in the case of Miss Phryne Fisher and Inspector Jack Robinson, wordless communication was what they were best at, for words said out loud usually didn’t convey correctly the meaning of what they truly wished to express with them.

 

And so Miss Fisher- who was also naturally good at reading people and exceptionally good at reading Jack- spoke first. And Jack’s message was as loud and clear as hers.

 

_Darers go first._

 

“Do you think the boy could have been intercepted after he purchased the papers from the publisher? I don’t think the note was slipped inside the newspaper before it was sold to him,” Miss Fisher went on. “That note didn’t make it inside my newspaper by mere accident or coincidence. This,” she pressed a long, manicured finger on top of the note, once more protected inside the plastic bag “is not the work of a bored adolescent or a disturbed person that only means to have a good laugh at the police’s expenses. This note was meant to get to my house, to me. Whoever wrote it and hid it inside the newspaper had to know we get it every day at Wardlow, he had to have hidden it right before the boy made the delivery. Otherwise they had no way to be sure the newspaper with the note inside would end up at my house, in my kitchen table, in my hands.”

 

Jack’s mind was thrown afoot by her little speech, and for a moment the only thought occupying his head was why he ever thought he could do without the sound of her passionate voice when she elaborated a theory for a case. He mentally shook it off and refocused quickly. He couldn’t allow himself to be affected by her. He was already feeling vulnerable after what had happened the day before- the bombs going off at the train station and the little brother and sister dying in his arms, and then passing out at the hospital and spending the night there like a convalescent. And, he was sure that she was able to see all that, read it on the expressions on his face. But, he didn’t want her to see just how vulnerable she made him, too.

 

He had to be a professional. And he also had to pick his battles. The case was more important than whatever could be going on between him and Miss Fisher. Someone that could very well be the culprit behind the attacks had contacted her, and the underlined letters in the odd, disturbing nursery rhyme formed a message meant to be taken as a warning, a threat. An invitation to play hide and seek like Miss Fisher had suggested when they’d been talking with Walker present in the interrogation room. For some reason- probably because by now she was a well-known private detective, and a wealthy socialité that lived extravagantly and didn’t hesitate to get herself in all kinds of trouble on top of that- the bastard responsible behind the bombings had contacted her. As he had told Inspector Walker, Jack was sure that lead was worth following and that it could actually take them to the person they were looking for before they made more bombs go off.

 

 _Focus, Robinson_ , he scolded himself. Their paths as investigators crossed again, like they had many times in the past. He could work with her, he could do this. Feelings aside. It wasn’t ideal, it wasn’t what he’d have chosen given the chance, but life rarely gave you the chance to make decisions: it threw at you whatever it pleased, and you had better find a way to manage it somehow. This was the case. Jack and Miss Fisher were, it seemed, forced to work together once more. _Just this once case_ , Jack thought. _This one case and then we’re back to how things were these past few months_.

 

Did he want things to go back to how they’d been those months?

 

_Focus, Robinson. Focus._

 

“Do you happen to know where we could find the newspaper hawker, Miss Fisher?” Jack asked, and he was relieved that in spite of the turmoil of emotions he was feeling his voice sounded as professional as it always was when attending to police matters.

 

“His name is Edwin Stokes. He’s a nice kid, well mannered. His mother is widowed and he is the eldest of five siblings. He had to drop out of school, and he delivers newspapers to help at home. Dot and Mr. Butler give him bread, milk and biscuits to take to his mother and siblings, sometimes,” Miss Fisher said, and Jack didn’t need to ask whose idea it had been.

 

“So his family is struggling financially,” Jack thought out loud. “Do you think someone could have offered him money in exchange of slipping the note inside your newspaper before he delivered at your house?”

 

She raised an eyebrow at him, questioningly.

 

“It wouldn’t surprise me if that it’s how it happened, Miss Fisher” Jack went on elaborating his theory more “This kid, Edwin Stokes you said was his name?” Miss Fisher nodded her head. “This kid doesn’t have it easy at home. His mother is a widow, he’s got another four siblings. That’s five mouths to feed if we don’t count the mother’s own. The kid has to drop out of school to start delivering newspapers so he can help his mother put a loaf of bread on the table. They are having trouble making ends meet - these are difficult times, after all. Would you like a cup of tea, Miss Fisher?” He interrupted himself abruptly to ask her that question, trying to sound as natural as possible and determined to treat her like he would any other fellow investigator or collaborator were he working with them. “I would like a cup of tea myself.”

 

If this surprised Miss Fisher, then she didn’t let it show.

 

“A cup of tea would be lovely, Jack. Thank you,” she said.

 

“I’ll be back in a moment, Miss Fisher.”

 

He left the interrogation room to go fetch a cup of tea each. Phryne stayed there, the typewritten note inside the plastic bag in the middle of the table in front of her, where any of them could easily grab it from their sitting position should they want to do so. She tried to concentrate on what Jack had just been saying about Edwin Stokes, the newspaper hawker. The Stokes family had been struggling financially since Mr. Stokes had passed away the year before. The kid’s mother was working herself to an early grave trying to feed all of her children, her income barely letting them scrap the surface of a decent life. She knew where Jack had been going with it, but she’d let him finish his theory once he returned with their tea.

 

Phryne didn’t want to think about anything else but the case. Inspector Walker had been wrong in dismissing the note she’d received as something an adolescent and his mates would do because they wanted to mess with the police by sending a fake note presumably from the responsible of the bombings to the lady detective down the street. The nursery rhyme was an old one, she doubted any kid these days knew it, and even if it hadn’t been, even if the message to decipher had been very easy and hidden in plain sight (it hadn’t taken her more than two minutes to figure out she had to put together all the letters that were underlined so a sentence would form), weren’t the most interesting things always hidden in plain sight? She was positive there was more to it, and that the nursery rhyme was just the beginning of an elaborated, twisted game that whoever was behind the attacks had chosen her to play with.

 

And Jack would play along with them. With _her_. Walker had said they could follow the lead if they wanted, and Jack had decided to do so, as had Phryne. They were working together once more, it seemed. The one thing she had been thinking she had to avoid just the other day, now it was happening. It was real.

 

 _It is what it is_ , she thought.

 

_Focus on the case, Phryne. Not Jack. The case._

 

But after everything that had happened and the state he had been in the day before, the state he was currently in (because really, he could fool about anyone, but there was no way he’d get away with fooling her: she could read the man like a book, and she didn’t like what was written there at the moment, the vulnerability and the loneliness and the worry, the self doubt, the tiredness from running away a mile a minute so flashbacks wouldn’t catch up with him), how couldn’t she stop herself from thinking about her inspector?

 

_No. He isn’t your inspector, you bloody stubborn woman! He walked away from you. He gave you up. Friends do not give friends up. Friends do not walk away from friends. They just don’t._

 

And yet she couldn’t help herself. She still cared for him. She worried about him. She had been to his hospital room to see him very late at night when he’d been heavily sedated so he wouldn’t know she’d been there. She had insisted- to Mac, to herself, and she would have insisted to the King of England himself had he been presented the issue - that she didn’t want to see him. But once her job helping the nurses dealing with the aftermath of the attack had been done, she hadn’t had any excuses to hide behind, and so she had given into her instincts and gone see him.

 

 _He will never know, of course_ , she’d told herself. _And neither will Mac. I’ll go back to live under the same roof as my parents before I breathe a word about my stopping by at his hospital room yesterday night._

 

Why had she really done that? Had she needed to make sure he was alright? Had she needed to see with her own eyes that he was in one piece, and breathing, still her Jack?

 

 _Don’t think about it,_ she scolded herself mentally _. The case. Think about the case._

 

“Your tea, Miss Fisher”

 

Her thoughts were cut short by the renewed presence of Inspector Robinson in the interrogation room. He placed a saucer and a cup of tea in front of her. She looked down into it and notice it was the exact color she prefered. The man knew how she took her tea! Whether he was making this on purpose to throw her off balance emotionally (and what would he do that for? He had left her! He had given her up!) or it was just a coincidence, she decided not to dwell on it.

 

_Focus on the case._

 

“Thank you, Inspector,” she said. “You were saying about Edwin Stokes…?”

 

“Oh, yes,” Jack said, taking a sip out of his own cup of tea. “The kid’s had it bad. He hears his mother talking to the neighbours, to other women in the market perhaps, telling them how hard it is to raise the children by herself, and how little money they have. And then one morning as he is delivering the paper someone approaches him, offers him money in exchange for a little favour…”

 

“Slipping a note inside the newspaper that he’s about to deliver to my house,” Miss Fisher said, completing Jack’s sentence.

 

“Exactly. He doesn’t necessarily have to have known what the note was about.”

 

“Whoever approached him could have told him it was a note from a lover,” she suggested, a sly smile on her face as the words left her mouth. One could have almost said she was teasing him. “The kid wouldn’t have had any reason to know differently.”

 

“Exactly.”

 

“So what do you say, Inspector?” Phryne stood up, her cup of tea empty now. “Shall we go speak to Edwin? I know where he lives. One morning it was raining badly, and I had Cec and Bert give him a ride. I didn’t want the poor boy to catch pneumonia.”

 

Jack finished his cup of tea quickly before he rose to his feet, and without saying a word he made his way to the door and held it open for Miss Fisher so she could step out of the interrogation room first. He would follow her suit.

 

No matter what happened between them, he seemed to be doomed to always be a few steps behind.

 

As the door swung shut behind him, deafening silence settled once again in the interrogation room. Only this time, there was no one there to listen to it.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The wonderful @MissingMissFisher proofread this chapter. She's the best friend and editor a fangirl could ask for.


	8. Chapter 8

“ _The two most powerful warriors are patience and time._ ”

 

Leo Tolstoy

  
  


They drove to Edwin Stokes’ house in Fitzroy in separate cars. Miss Fisher didn't offer him a ride with her in the Hispano-Suiza, and the inspector didn't hesitate before he headed for his own motor car after getting the Stokes family home address from her. The last time she had offered him a ride he had been very clear about his opinion on her driving. It had been during the Gerty Haynes case, the catalyst for the ending of their partnership.

 

Jack Robinson could drove his car however he pleased, and the Honourable Phryne Fisher would do the same. That meant, of course, that she arrived at their destination before he did and had to wait for him. She stayed seated behind the wheel, her mind occupied with trying to keep thoughts and emotions regarding the man in question at minimum. _The case, Miss Fisher, focus on the case_ ; these words would ring inside her head every time her thoughts went astray. She found it _almost_ deliciously ironic that the voice inside her head sounded a lot like the inspector’s. (And for the sake of her sanity she tried not to pay too much attention to that, or to the fact that apparently she was now calling herself _Miss Fisher_ , like he usually did.)

 

They walked up to the house and waited at the door after Jack had knocked without any words being exchanged between them. The property was in very bad condition. The walls, roof and little front yard spoke of hard times that were only getting harder. The lawn needed to be mowed, the paint on the walls was peeling. Phryne had known Edwin’s family had been struggling since his father’s passing, and after seeing the place he lived in she wondered if the loaves of bread and the biscuits sometimes Dot gave the kid when he delivered the paper at Wardlow were the only food he and his siblings had those days. She made a mental note to talk to Mr. Butler about having Cec and Bert deliver food weekly for Edwin and his family. She knew what it was like to live that way, and if she could help the Stokes children and his mother more she would do so.

 

It was Edwin who opened the door. He had a toddler on his hip, and both him and the little girl looked disheveled, tired and on the verge of tears. Phryne remembered that the older kids in her childhood neighborhood were often entrusted with the care of the younger ones when their parents left the house to work in the factories or at wealthy people’s homes as staff for long hours every day. She supposed that had to be the case with Edwin’s mother, and that after finishing his route delivering papers he stayed at home taking care of his brothers and sisters.

 

“Hello, Edwin,” she said.

 

“Hullo, Miss Fisher, ma’am,” the boy said, a curious expression on his face. What was the good-hearted, generous Miss Fisher doing at his house?

 

He seemed a little bit uncomfortable that they had dropped by unannounced. Phryne could tell Jack noticed this as well, and knew that he'd probably link it to the boy having something to hide, feeling nervous because he had done someone a 'favor’ by slipping the note inside the newspaper he delivered at her house, and now probably he realized that he shouldn't have, and that he was in trouble.

 

But Phryne knew better than to not jump to conclusions so quickly when it came to children. She didn’t entertain the thought of having her own, never had, in fact, and she didn’t spend much time around them (not something she’d be interested in, either), but she had been a kid living in poverty just like Edwin now, and she remembered what it was like. She hadn’t liked it when her aunt had visited their house in Collingwood. In fact, she hadn’t liked having visitors at all, especially if they were not from Collingwood. She had always been able to feel them, the looks of pity they’d give her and her sister. _Poor kids,_ they’d think. And it'd hurt every single time, that look and the words that although unspoken would ring loud and clear.

 

Yes, poor. They were _poor_. They hadn’t always had food on the table- sometimes they’d split a piece of bread in half, eat one and save the other for the following day just in case. They had never taken food as a given, Phryne and Janey. They’d never had clean clothes, or proper winter clothes, or shoes that fit. And their house had looked much like the Stokes’ family did. And she'd hated having people over- it had always made her so uncomfortable and nervous, so self conscious. She had always tried to hold herself with pride and dignity, and it had always felt like a blow to those things to have people see how they lived in the one bedroom house that had been so similar in appearance to the Stokes’.

 

“How do you do, Edwin?” Phryne greeted the boy, who was now making shushing sounds to his little sister in an attempt to stop her whining. “We are sorry for dropping by unannounced. Is this a bad time for us to visit?”

 

“Is he with welfare?”

 

Edwin was eying Jack with a suspicious look on his boyish, pointy face. It was clear that the kid didn’t trust the Inspector and that the man’s presence was most likely not welcomed at the time.

 

“This is Detective Inspector Jack Robinson,” Phryne introduced them. “He is my friend.”

 

The words stung her when she said them, and she could tell that they had an effect on Jack as well. But what was she supposed to say to the kid in order to win Jack his trust? She didn’t have much experience with kids, but she had enough common sense to know that the truth wouldn’t do in this case.

 

She couldn’t just say ‘Well, Edwin, you see, this is Detective Inspector Jack Robinson. He is a good man. We used to be friends, and partners. We worked together very well, we solved murder cases. But one day he decided he wanted more, but I couldn’t give him more- at least not on his terms-, and so my presence in his life became unbearable and he gave our relationship up because he’s too noble of a man to ask me to give anything of myself up. And you see, I wouldn’t have done such a thing anyway. Well, Edwin, it’s complicated between Jack and I, but I assure you he’s trustworthy.’ She wouldn’t say that to a boy that couldn’t be older than twelve years old! (She hadn’t even said that to Mac, a grown up woman and the closest thing to a sister she had ever let herself have after Janey’s passing. And it wasn’t a conversation she could see herself having with anyone anytime soon, let alone sober.)

 

“Inspector?” Edwin asked. Apparently being an officer of the law wasn’t much better than working for welfare in the kid’s eyes. He scrunched up his nose at Jack. “He a copper, then, eh? He with the police?”

 

“Yes, Edwin, I work with the police.” Jack said gently. “My friend,

Miss Fisher,  here,” Phryne could hear the hesitation in his voice when he said the words, but she chose to ignore it just like she had chosen to ignore how tense his body had gotten when she had called him her friend a moment ago, “would like you to help us with something. We were wondering if we could ask you a few questions. Would that be all right?”

 

“Me mumma said I ain’t sposed to talk to coppers,” Edwin made a move to close the door on their faces, but Phryne was quicker and held it open before the kid- toddler on his hip and all- had the chance to duck inside the house and leave the two of them out there.

 

“Is your mother home, Edwin?” Phryne asked with a warm smile. “Perhaps you could ask for her permission to talk to us.”

 

“Me mumma ain’t home right now, and she wouldn’t let me talk to no coppers.” He insisted. He tried to close the door on them again, but Phryne tried to get Edwin to listen to her once more.

 

“Why did you ask if the Inspector was with welfare, Edwin? Have you been having trouble with welfare? Jack here is friends with people at the welfare office. Is there something we could help you with? ”

 

The expression on the boy’s face changed. The toddler had calmed down and now she had her face buried in the crook of Edwin’s neck. She was sucking her thumb, and it seemed that she was about to fall asleep at any moment in her older brother's arms.

 

“We would like to see about helping you, Edwin, were it possible.” Jack said.

 

“I’ll lay Elsie down in her crib,” the boy said. He was still eying them both wearily. “Me siblings are taking a nap. Elsie woke up and she was upset. She wanted me mumma. I’ll lay her down, and go out again to talk to you and the copper,” he said to Miss Fisher, who nodded her head yes.

 

And then the boy closed the door and disappeared inside the house, leaving the two adults outside waiting for him to return.

 

“Poor kid,” Phryne said out loud, more to herself than to the inspector. Then, she turned to him and asked: “Do you think welfare has been giving Mrs. Stokes trouble?”

 

“Probably,” Jack said, taking a look around and noticing the condition the property was in. “A widow with five children to feed, living in a house that’s in this state, in this part of town... She must be barely scraping by. Perhaps someone from welfare was here and she took it the wrong way,” Jack guessed out loud. “Perhaps they meant to offer her help and she thought they wanted to take the children from her. Maybe they did want to take the children from her, I don’t know. Although, if that had been the case, I can’t see why they didn’t- there wouldn’t have been anything to stop them, I suppose. She is probably paranoid after the visit from welfare, whatever the reason behind it, and so she instructed Edwin he mustn't talk to strangers, or let them into the house.”

 

“Yes, it does make sense. She must be at work,” Phryne assumed. “Last I heard from Dot, Mrs. Stokes had been let go from the factory- she missed work one day because one of the kids had a fever and she stayed at home. She was working again now, though- Dot didn’t know if she got a job as a maid, or if she had managed to find a job at a different factory.”

 

“Must be difficult with the kids, the long hours…”

 

They were making small talk, the two of them. She couldn’t believe it. How it was that they came to that, behaving like two strangers, when they had gone through so much together? He had been the person she had leaned on the most when Murdoch Foyle had escaped prison. He had been there for her, constantly reminding her not to be afraid of shadows, even though at the time he had been battling shadows of his own. But he had been there for her. He had done the impossible to save her and Jane when Foyle had abducted them. He had gone to all lengths to protect her, would have done anything to make sure they were safe. And then, when they had found Janey’s mortal remains, he had been there by her side. He had been her lifeline. She had physically and emotionally held onto him, and he had let her. He had allowed her to seek comfort and safety in his arms, and he had provided her with them. It hadn’t been a sexual one, it probably would never be a sexual one, but t _hey had had a relationship-_  a close one. Phryne had been closer to him than to any man she had ever slept with, and he knew more about the depths of her heart than any of the lovers she had taken over the course of the years.

 

But now that was broken. Gone.

 

And there they were, making small talk at the front of a house that was falling apart on itself just like their personal bond had started to the night he had announced to her he couldn’t work with her anymore, be friends with her anymore. And then, he had walked away from her and out of her life. And out of her life he had stayed (but not out of her mind. Oh no, never far from her mind, and this she hated to admit) until the day before when a madman had terrorized Melbourne and its citizens by making four bombs go off.

 

How could two people that had experienced so much together end up standing side by side filling the uncomfortable silence with small talk as if they were two perfect strangers? How was that possible? And why did it hurt so much? Why did she care so much whether he was in her life or not?

 

Many men- many people, in fact, why narrow it down to the male gender?- had walked away from her life, or her from theirs, and the world hadn’t come to an abrupt end because of it. Those things happened- people grew apart, naturally, sometimes both parted, sometimes just the one. But in either case, she had never regretted, and she had never pinned after anyone. It had never affected her, had never taken so much of her time, her thoughts, her peace of mind.

 

He was different, somehow. Detective Inspector Jack Robinson was different, the exception to the rule. He was in her mind, in her veins, in her blood, and she couldn’t get him out. He had walked out of her life, oh that he had done without so much as a goodbye, but he refused to get out of that stubborn head of hers. And there she was, the Honourable Miss Fisher, contemplating the hardships of having to make small talk with someone she could have sworn would be her partner forever after everything he’d seen her endure. After everything they had endured together.

 

Edwin Stokes opened the door to the house once more and stepped out, luring Miss Fisher out of the thoughts she’d rather push to the back of her head and not contemplate any longer.

 

“Elsie is asleep now, all right,” Edwin told them. He still looked at them wearily, not entirely sure if he was doing the right thing by talking to the lady that lived at the beautiful house in St. Kilda and her copper friend. His mother had advised not to talk to strangers or anyone from welfare or the police department, after all- and that man was a stranger _and_ a copper. “What’d you want, Miss?”

 

Phryne decided she had to word this carefully if she wanted to gain more of Edwin’s trust so he would answer truthfully.

 

“You deliver the newspaper at my house every day,” she began.

 

“If this is about me being late with the paper today, Miss,” the boy interrupted her to explain “I already told Mr. B and Miss Dot that it wasn’t me fault…”

 

“We know that, Edwin,” Jack stepped into the conversation to reassure him. “The publisher you buy the newspapers from closed the edition very late last night due to what happened yesterday. Do you know what happened yesterday, Edwin?” he asked the boy.

 

Edwin swallowed hard and nodded his head.

 

“People died,” he simply stated. Then, he added, somberly: “Me dad is dead.”

 

“We know, Edwin,” Phryne said, kneeling down carefully so she was eye to eye with the boy. “We are sorry. I imagine what you must be going through. I had a sister called Jane, and she died when I was about your age, too.”

 

“Was she a kid?” he asked.

 

“Yes, she was.”

 

“Kids died yesterday,” Edwin said. “I read it in the papers,” he admitted this as if it was something wrong, reading papers he was supposed to deliver and sell later.

 

“There is nothing wrong with reading a copy of the paper before selling it, Edwin,” Jack reassured him. “It isn’t stealing.”

 

The boy looked at them, but didn’t say anything.

 

“We wanted to ask you about the copy of the newspaper you delivered to my house today,” Phryne said. “There was a note slipped inside of it, a note that could lead us to whoever made the bombs you read about go off yesterday. The person  responsible for what happened.” Edwin still said nothing, but he was listening to her. “We wanted to ask you if you happened to know who slipped that note inside the newspaper you delivered to my house. Or if someone approached you and asked you to slip it inside, or if perhaps they offered you something in exchange of this favour.”

 

Edwin got visibly nervous at this. His body tensed and he looked anywhere but Phryne’s or Jack’s eyes. She had definitely struck a chord there.

 

“Me mumma lost her job at the factory once,” the kid said. “She got a new one, she’s doing good, but it’s hard for her with all five of us,” he talked more and more quickly. “I dropped out of school to deliver papers and help her. Me mumma wanted me to stay in school, but me dad would have wanted me to help me mumma and me siblings. Me mumma lost her first job at the factory when she missed a day because Thomas was sick. She can't miss no more work days…”

 

“Did someone threaten your mother's job at the factory if you didn't slip the note inside the newspaper?” Phryne asked him.

 

“I didn't slip no note!” Edwin insisted. “I didn't know what was in the paper…” There were now tears forming in Edwin’s big, brown doe-eyes. “Toby Fletcher, one of the older newspaper hawkers, he’s always there first thing in the morning. When I got there today, after we waited for the newspapers, he told me he heard you had called the publisher to complain about your newspaper, said there were missing sections, and that other sections had ink smudges or were wrinkled or stained.” Phryne and Jack exchanged a look, and she confirmed what he suspected: she had not made such a call to complain about the newspaper copy that was delivered at her house every day.

 

“I did not call the publisher, Edwin,” Phryne told him. “I don’t have any complaints about you or the newspaper copies we get daily at Wardlow. Do you understand that?” The kid nodded his head yes. “What else did Toby say to you? Were you scared you were going to lose your job as a newspaper hawker?”

 

“Toby said you were no lady to mess with. And that trouble with a wealthy lady from St. Kilda meant the publisher wouldn’t sell me no more newspapers to deliver. He told me he was looking out for me, that he knew about me dad dying and me mumma working at the factory all day, and that I have to help her because she don’t make enough money to feed the five of us. And he told me he heard what happened with welfare. They came sticking up their noses where they don’t belong. That old hag down the street,” he pointed at that direction with his head “Mrs. Scott, she called ‘em. She told ‘em me mumma is never at home and that we was always alone. She should stick her foot in her mouth, the old hag, me dad would say,” he finished, displaying a colorful language Miss Fisher had never heard before from the mouth of the usually well-mannered boy.

 

“So what else did this Toby Fletcher tell you, Edwin?” Jack asked him.

 

“He gave me a copy of the paper, put it on top of me pile. He told me to deliver that one at your house, Miss Fisher. That the publisher closed the edition late, and most of the papers had ink smudges and the printing wasn’t no good because they had been in a rush, they had. But that he made sure that one copy was perfect so you wouldn’t have no complaints about it.”

 

“So this older kid, this other newspaper hawker, Toby Fletcher, you said was his name,” Jack began retelling exactly what Edwin had just told them, “gave you a copy of today newspaper that he had specifically checked himself didn’t have any ink smudges or wrinkled pages so Miss Fisher wouldn’t call the publisher with any more complaints.”

 

“He wanted to make sure I got that copy because it was the one with the note slipped inside,” Phryne told Jack. “Edwin never knew about the note, it was already slipped there when he arrived at the publisher’s this morning.” She turned to the kid once more. “Where can we find Toby Fletcher, Edwin?”

 

“I don’t know where he lives, but he always at the publisher’s first thing in the morning.” And then he added with a worried look on his face: “Am I in trouble, Miss?”

 

“No, Edwin, you are not,” Phryne promised him. “You’ve been really helpful to us, Edwin.”

 

“You said you could help me mumma. Can you make welfare stop bothering her? Us?” He was looking at Jack now.

 

“I’ll put in a good word for you mother, Edwin, so people at welfare know she is a hard working woman that needs help,” Jack told the kid.

 

“I’ll have Cec and Bert drop by your house with some food for you and your siblings, is that all right, Edwin?”

 

“Yes, Miss. Thank you, Miss.”

 

“One last thing, Edwin,” Phryne said. “What does Toby Fletcher look like?”

Edwin looked a little bit unsure, but after Phryne promised they wouldn’t breathe a word to Toby about how they had linked him to the newspaper that had been delivered at Wardlow, he proceeded to describe the older kid so they could easily recognize him.

 

“Now go back inside, lad,” Jack said. “Go back inside and take care of your siblings. You’ve been very helpful to both of us.”

 

He gave the two detectives one last look before he turned on his heels and went back inside the house. Once they saw that he had locked the door behind his back, the adults made their way back to where they had parked their cars respectively, one right in front of the other. When they reached Phryne’s beautiful Hispano-Suiza, they stopped walking and looked at one another to have one last discussion about the direction the case was taking before they parted.

 

“What do you say we wait for Toby Fletcher tomorrow morning at the publisher’s before he purchases his newspapers, Inspector?”

 

“I say this was definitely a lead worth following, Miss Fisher, and that I will see you there first thing in the morning tomorrow.”

 

He made a move to go to his car, parked right behind hers, when her voice made him turn on his heel to face her again.

 

“You don’t think Inspector Walker could still be right, then?” Phryne asked him. “That perhaps this Toby Fletcher knows I am a lady detective and he decided to use Edwin as a pawn to play a joke on me and the Victoria Police?”

 

“Do you?” came Jack’s reply.

 

“No, I don’t. I really don’t.”

 

“Neither do I.”

 

A moment of silence followed, in which both of them did nothing, but stare at each other’s eyes, almost daring the other to speak first. To say something, anything that wasn’t case related. Something about what had happened the day before and how it had affected them on a personal level, given their history, and the fact that they had both seen from up close the horrors of the war and of the previous day. He had been in the trenches, and he had been in one of the sites of the explosion, and she had driven an ambulance in France during the Great War, and had helped the nurses at the hospital attending to the injured after the bombings in the train station and the park. And they understood each other so very well: the need to talk, to share the pain and the worry and the anxiety with someone that knew how it was like, what it felt like, what it looked like.

 

But they didn’t say anything of the sort. When the silence became so deafening it began to hurt their ears and make the blood in there accumulate, Phryne chose to break it:

 

“Well, I’ll be on my way, then, Inspector.”

 

“Until tomorrow, Miss Fisher” was his farewell.

 

Each got into their respective cars trying not to make eye contact with the other or their vehicle. She was about to start the engine on the Hispano-Suiza when she dropped one of her gloves under the seat. She was fumbling with her hand to find the missing glove when she heard a rumble, strong and dry as a explosion, from the motor car that was parked behind hers.

  
The Inspector’s car.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> @MissingMissFisher proofread this chapter. I really don't know what I'd do without her.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want to thank @MissingMissFisher for proofreading this chapter. And I want to thank her for being the awesome, wonderful friend that she is.

“ _The brutality and inhumanity of war stood in great contrast to what I had heard and read about as a youth._ ”

 

Reinhold Spengler, war volunteer 1st Bavarian Infanterie Regiment., 1916

 

 

It was an odd thing, what war did to its survivors. What it meant to them, and what they meant to _it._ They were the living, walking proof to the ones that hadn't seen what went on in the trenches, and what those horrible things they had heard about had, in fact, happened. They had happened to them. To all of them, the soldiers and the volunteers. They came back home marked and scarred as if they all belonged in the same butchering house. War snatched them of their individuality and turned them all into the same thing: those that had inexplicably escaped to go back to something that resembled the life they had once had or dreamed of having. They came back as the ghosts of what they had been or could have been before a conflict between nations broke and forced them to leave everything on hold to go fight for King and Country.

 

Some tried to bury it and succeeded. Some others were buried by it, some of them even before returning. Some others were still impacted by it many years after the last time they smelt the odor of blood, dirt and death while holding on… for what? For dear life? Was _life_ in the complete sense of the world what awaited them after ceasefire? Could it be called _life_ if they were always on the verge of exploding like the grenades they had thrown and been thrown at and seen go off? That was what it was like for some of the survivors: the aftermath had nothing to do with the new beginning some spoke of. It was nothing but a constant state of calm before the storm, the perpetual, anxiety-inducing knowledge that at any moment, any given day, something- no matter how little or insignificant in the eyes of others- could denote and send them right back to the hell they had been lucky to escape. Right back to the hell that was buried deep within themselves and that they’d never be freed of. Time did not heal, and distance was nothing if it only took a loud sound, an acidic smell, an unexpected movement, a tragedy to push you right back down the rabbit hole.

 

Like how the uproar of a motorcar engine malfunctioning could be so horribly similar to that of a machine gun being fired. Deafening and thundering, the roar of a hungry lion ready to devour its prey. Abrupt and astonishing for some, briefly startling for a few minutes, one’s heart jumping violently into one’s throat, and one’s stomach clenching so tightly it could fit in one’s fist. But as a whole, it wasn’t but a momentary fright. For others it was a war flashback, their worst memories being played before their eyes over and over again. A regurgitation of nightmare-like experiences they had suffered through while wide awake, and that had had more to do with cruel, bitter reality than with unpleasant dreams.

 

These were a few of the thoughts that crashed into the mind of Phryne Fisher soon as she heard the sound of the broken engine that erupted and disturbed the quiet of the street. The only two people out there were the lady detective and Detective Inspector Jack Robinson, both of them sitting behind the wheels of their respective motor vehicles. Miss Fisher’s heart had stopped for a second when she heard the noise, and her immediate reaction was to climb out of her Hispano-Suiza to rush over to the inspector’s more modest car.

 

Smoke was coming out of the closed hood, its smell hanging in the air and making Phryne cough. She had to protect both her mouth and nose with her hand the closer she approached her former partner’s damaged vehicle. She knew her way around a motor car- she loved them, she had been driving since she’d been able to get her hands on a forged license when she was still underage. She had learned to drive in France after joining the ambulance brigade, and back then, in the middle of a conflict and with little time to waste on mechanics, she had also gotten very good at vehicle maintenance. She wasn’t as good as some women she knew, but it was clear at first sight that the engine on the Inspector’s car had melted. It didn’t surprise her- it was an old car, after all.

 

“Jack, are you all right?” she asked, coughing some more.

 

He had not made any move whatsoever to get out of the car. He was still sitting behind the wheel, both hands on it, partially hidden by the smoke that was still coming out of the closed bonnet. He wasn’t making any attempts to cover his mouth or nose like Phryne was, nor did he seem at all present in the same time and space as she was. His eyes were focused on an undetermined point, and his breath was coming in very short puffs. He was breathing with difficulty, she noticed, but she had seen this happen to people plenty of times- both before, during and after the Great War- to know exactly that his breathing difficulties were not because of the smoke from the damaged engine. Neither was the sweat that was visibly soaking through his dressing shirt, making his hair damp, big droplets running down his face. His palms were sweaty, too. And yet, he was shivering.

 

Jack Robinson was having a shell shock attack.

 

It had been a long time since he last had one of this magnitude. Not even the events of the previous days when he had been working a murder case at the railway station, and the first two bombs going off had sent him spiraling down into this reaction. He had had lives to save and help to offer. There had been others there, the dead and the terribly injured. And those children that had died in his arms before he could have done something to assist them… He had had something to hold onto, something to grab that had prevented him from losing control. He hadn’t allowed darkness to overtake him. He had passed out at the hospital later, yet, and had had to spend the night there as a precaution. But that hadn’t been a panic attack as much as a strong, emotional reaction to the hell he had witnessed and the not so different hell he still remembered from when he’d been a soldier. This, on the other hand, was completely different. He had reached his breaking point when faced with something as common as a motor car malfunction, the unexpectedness of it all piling on top of everything else and making him finally crumble under its weight.

 

His mind was blank, all coherent thought or ability to process information coherently erased from it momentarily. The only thing that persisted was the immediate sense of impending doom and death. The knowledge that felt so certain it was impossible he was mistaken, that something terrible was about to happen and that there was nothing that could be done about it. He knew it’d happen, he knew it’d be soon, but he couldn’t prevent it. It couldn’t be stopped. _It-_ whatever _it_ was- was coming for him. It was coming to get him. It’d be there any minute now, and he’d be gone before he had time to defend himself. Before he had time to face it. It’d explode on him like a grenade from the enemy front, and it would all be over in seconds. The smoke and his own sweat would be the last things he’d smell, and his heart beating desperately in his eardrums would be the last mixture of sensation and sound that his mortal body would ever have.

 

Jack had never been so conscious of his own body before- nerves and fibers, muscles and heartstrings- and so detached from it at the same time. It was a contradictory, ambiguous sensation. His chest hurt- it felt almost as if an invisible hand made of steel were wrapping itself around him, pressing and pressing until it robbed his lungs of all oxygen. Until he passed out from the pain. (Maybe if he passed out, his eyes would close. Maybe he’d stop seeing the horrible imagery that his mind was forcing him to contemplate. The memories of the other soldiers, the dead ones, the injured, the bombings that had occurred several years ago and the ones that had taken place the previous day…)

 

“Jack” Phryne called to him softly as to not frighten him further, but it seemed impossible to reach him. The state he was in had put up an invisible iron wall between them, and so her voice could not get to his ears. “Jack” she tried once more.

 

But deep down she knew it was futile. He was in full shell shock mode, and it wasn’t as simple as calling his name and expecting him to snap out of it. It didn’t work like that. She had had several panic attacks herself, after the war and when she’d been living in Paris under René’s watchful, possessive eyes. And she had had them after escaping that hell and going back to London. Mac had helped her then, just like Phryne had helped others in the same situation when the roles had been reversed. This was not a foreign situation to her, sadly.

 

“Jack,” Phryne said softly once more, hovering a little over him but avoiding touching him in case the sudden contact made him feel threatened or scared. “Jack, your car engine broke.”

 

He wasn’t listening to her, she knew he wasn’t. His breathing was becoming more and more elaborated, his eyes reddened by the smoke, his face and hands and the skin under his clothes soaked in cool transpiration. He was there physically, but he might as well have been back in the hellish trenches for all the attention he was paying to his surroundings. His mind had taken him somewhere else, somewhere horrible and dark that neither Phryne nor anyone that had actually been there wished to return to, not even in the form of flashbacks.

 

“We need to get you out of the car, Jack.” Her voice was still soft. She was doing her best to remain calm. There was no way he’d be able to help him if she lost herself in the pain that caused her to see him undone like this.

 

She had never imagined she’d ever see _him_ coming apart. She was no fool, she knew very well all heroes were flawed, and she didn’t even believe in having heroes herself- she was her own hero, she didn’t need any other. But she could have never pictured Jack coming apart like that, and for the briefest moment she allowed herself to wonder if when he’d come to terms with his decision to break up their partnership he had reacted like that. Had he come undone like that, overcome with the pain of accepting he had to sever all ties with her for the good of his heart… Or had he been overwhelmed by relief?

 

_Stop it,_ she scolded herself. _Stop it, stop it, stop it. This is not the time for such thoughts. He needs help._

 

She censored her own mind, for she had been about to think _He needs you_. But Phryne stopped herself. She wasn’t going to admit that. She wasn’t going to admit to him needing her. At the moment, the Inspector simply needed someone to help him through this, and she happened to be there. And damn her before she let anyone suffer if there was anything she could do to help! Even if that person was a former friend, a former partner. Even if it was someone that had hurt her by leaving.

 

He had been there to support her at one of the worst moments of her life, when she had solved her sister’s murder. He had offered her his help even when he had been fighting a hard battle himself, with his divorce and the troubles he’d had at the time in his personal life. He had given him a hand to hold onto and a shoulder to cry on when they’d recovered Janey’s bones. He had not left her alone then. He had stayed. She would be there for him now, too. She would stay. She wouldn’t leave him.

 

Phryne wished she could take a deep breath to prepare herself, but all she’d breathed in would have been smoke. It wasn’t as bad as before, but it was still coming out of the bonnet. She coughed some more, a gloved hand over her nose and mouth. She was almost positive that she’d have to get rid of the clothes she was wearing because of the strong smell that they were surely getting broiled with.

 

Not one to make mental notes in any situation- she usually just went with her instincts, or with the flow, whatever seemed more suited for the circumstance-, she mentally thought of the things she knew she had to do, and those she knew she had better avoided doing. She’d been speaking softly to him, and that was all right. She’d used short sentences, that was good as well. Talk, she had to talk to him. Remind him he wasn’t alone. Remind him he didn’t have to be afraid of shadows, for they couldn’t reach him. They wouldn’t reach him.

 

“Jack, listen to me. Your car engine is broken. I need you to get out of the car, all right?”

 

As she repeated this, something happened: he turned his head slightly and looked at her. The look in his eyes was empty, yes, and he still seemed too far away for her to reach him. But, at least he was acknowledging her presence. Perhaps, he was still seeing the flashes from the war or the bomb attacks the day before, but he was following the sound of her voice. That was a good sign.

 

“We don’t have to stay here, Jack,” she told him. “We can go somewhere else. I can drive you home. And then, I can telephone Cec and Bert and have them pick up your vehicle and take it to a mechanic.”

 

He was struggling to breathe. He was agitated, and overwhelmed by fear and panic. It had to be horrible, everything that he was feeling. It was the war, she reminded herself. The war had scarred him, it had scarred them all, and they were all marked by its cruelty. All of them bore the stitches of the wounds the war had inflicted upon them, and she wondered if they would ever be healed? No. She couldn’t imagine a time when a loud noise or smoke or the smell of blood or a tragedy like a bombing attack by some perverse maniac wouldn’t send the survivors into shell shock. Jack was one of many men and women that had had their lives brutally turned upside down by their experiences on the battlefield. One didn’t erase those memories, those fears, so easily. Time passed, years went on, but those things stayed. They were permanent. Oh, yes, she knew first hand about that: nothing was more permanent than trauma.

 

Phryne noticed his eyes were beginning to focus on her face. He looked disorientated, like a drunken man trying to find his way home after having one too many at the local pub. He probably felt dizzy, too. She was still avoiding touching him, but she was alert in case he lost his balance and fell sideways.

 

“Jack, you are all right,” she repeated calmly. “You are here with me, and everything will be all right.” She gave into the urge to touch him and grabbed his face in both her hands, trying to be as gentle as possible as to not upset him further. It was important that she made him feel calm. Her touch was delicate and soft, and through the expensive fabric of her elegant gloves she could feel his skin was covered in ice cold sweat. “Jack, let’s get you out of the car,” she insisted once more, trying to make it sound as a suggestion instead of like an order or a desperate plea.

 

She helped him out of the vehicle and onto his feet. He leaned heavily on her, as if his body had been made of lead. He wouldn’t stand steady, so she had to support him. His knees were shaking violently and his breathing was coming in sharp, uneven puffs.

 

It destroyed her to see him like this. She couldn’t imagine what was going on through his mind at the moment, what horrors he was being forced to relive. But if his memories of the war (and now the recent attack at the train station) were anything like the ones she had… Good Lord, she wouldn’t wish that on her worst enemy! Not even on her father!

 

“Come on, Jack,” she tried to encourage him to walk toward the Hispano-Suiza. “Come on, I’ll take you somewhere safe. You’re safe,” she kept to reassure him.

 

“Home,” he managed to say in between his efforts to steady his breathing. “Home.”

 

“Do you want to go home?” she asked him as she helped him into the seat opposite to the driver’s in her car. “Do you want me to take you home?”

 

He nodded his head yes, his eyes closed and a hand closed over his chest. _Chest pains_ , she thought. _He must me having chest pains._

 

“Breath, Jack,” she instructed him. She slid next to him, an arm still wrapped around his midriff to support him. She wanted him to be sitting as upright as possible. “Breathe. One, two, three, breathe.” She showed him how, taking a deep breath herself. “Do you think you can do that for me, Jack?” He nodded his head again. “Good. One, two, three, breathe”. They breathed together. “Again,” she said. “One, two, three, breathe.”

 

Several minutes passed and they did nothing but sit in the front of Phryne’s car, counting to three and taking slow, deep breaths. After she made him repeat this action a couple of times, his breathing pattern began to normalize.

 

“Very good job, Jack. Once more. One, two, three, breathe.”

 

“Home,” he repeated. He looked so lost, so desperate to be found. Oh how she wished she knew how to find him in the middle of the hell he was stuck in. How she wished she knew exactly what to do to bring him back, right there with her, at the present time. Where nothing could hurt him, at least not immediately. At least not if she could help it.

 

“Yes, I know, Jack. I’ll take you home if you want, but first I need you to breathe, all right? Keep breathing like I showed you, all right?”

 

“All right,” he managed to rasp out weakly.

 

He was more responsive, and that relieved her greatly. He was coming down from his shell shock attack, and soon she’d deem it safe enough to drive him to his home. She’d never been there, he’d never invited her there. It was funny in a way, she thought to herself.

 

He had been at her home plenty of times; ever since their partnership had begun he had been a frequent dinner guest at Wardlow, and they had shared so many nightcaps over the course of those months that she had lost count. It wasn’t odd to see him standing at the front door of the beautiful St. Kilda residence, and yet none of his neighbours could have admitted to ever seeing Miss Fisher near his house, simply because none of them had. She’d never been invited over, she had never been asked around for a cup of tea or a nightcap. She had never invited herself over, either. Phryne knew the Inspector was a private person, recently divorced and very old fashioned. She hadn’t wanted to impose, or to make him feel like he had to offer something he wasn’t sure about.

 

She knew where the house was, of course. She was a lady detective: finding out things, making sure the pieces of the puzzle fit correctly was part of her job. She was a curious woman, she’d wondered. She’d wondered where he lived: how it was, where it was, if it was anything like him. Or if she’d be surprised to learn that was where he spent whatever free time he had when he wasn’t at City South elbows deep in a fresh murder case. She’d wondered if he’d moved out of the house he had first lived in with Rosie after they’d been married (he had.) She wondered a lot of things about her former partner in the mystery solving business, and when he’d walked out on them she had thought they would always remain a mystery.

 

Well, apparently some of them wouldn’t remain so mysterious after all. Would they?

 

After making sure once more that he was doing remarkably better and taking a last glance at the Inspector’s broken motor car, she started the engine of her own vehicle and began driving more cautiously than she would have done had she been alone or accompanied by somebody else. She’d have to telephone Cec and Bert to see if they could so something about Jack’s car. The neighborhood wasn’t exactly like hers, but it wasn’t such a bad one, either- besides, if somebody tried to steal the car, they’d have a hard time getting it to work, with what the state the engine had to be in. _And if they do steal it somehow, I’ll buy him another one,_ she thought as she glanced sideways to reassure herself that he was doing better and that the fresh air was, as she had imagined, helping him recover from his shell shock attack. _I’d buy him ten new cars if he’d let me, I just want to take him home and make sure he is all right now._

 

Those weren’t things she’d admit out loud. Those were private thoughts that later she would deny even to herself.

 

But right now, it seemed, she was headed for Detective Inspector Jack Robinson’s home, and he was right there at her side.  


	10. Chapter 10

“ _Perhaps someday the sun will shine again,_

_And I shall see that still the skies are blue,_

_And feel once more I do not live in vain,_

_Although bereft of you._ ”

 

Vera Brittain

  
  


The Honourable Phryne Fisher would be lying if she said she'd never imagine herself visiting the home of one Detective Inspector Jack Robinson. In these imaginary visits, they were always headed straight for his bedroom and rather occupied by urgent, burning matters of the flesh. The fantasies had been sexually oriented at first, like they always were when she found a man interesting and aesthetically appealing. But then something curious had happened: she had begun thinking of the aftermath as much as she thought of the sexual act itself. She started to entertain several different ideas of what she’d do afterwards, once physically sated and no longer thirsty for the carnal pleasure his body had to offer. She would probably find his dress shirt, forgotten somewhere on the floor in the throes of passion, put it on and take the time to prowl around the house taking on the littlest details to try and satisfy her never ending thirst for knowledge. She’d run her fingertips through the spine of the collections housed in his bookshelves. She’d breathe in the smell of the freshly cut flowers from his own garden in the vase adorning the dining table. She’d discover every nook of the place until she knew it like the back of her hand.

 

He’d stay in the bed all the while, fast asleep and snoring slightly (for some reason she considered this an important detail for her fantasies of him: he snored, and it was a pleasant sound to her ears.) And then she would go back to bed, to him and his arms, and fall asleep with her head hidden in the crook of his neck until he woke her up for another round of lovemaking. It was a subject she’d spent several hours musing on, the place where he lived and how her first time visiting it would be. How _all_ of their _first times_ would be. She would be lying if she said otherwise.

 

But what cruel, harsh reality had in stock for them was very different from the fantasies she had entertained when they’d been partners in crime solving, before their fallout. Before their relationship crashed like Gerty’s motorcar on that fateful evening. The circumstances under which she was visiting the inspector’s house for the first time had little to do with pleasure. She wasn’t there on a social call, either, or to discuss the latest progress on a case. It was with one arm firmly wrapped about Jack’s waist to help him walk steady that she crossed the threshold to the man’s property. He still was white as a ghost and shaking like a leaf, his heart beating so violently she could almost hear it. For all the difficult he still had breathing, he may as well have been drowning. And in a way, Phryne thought, he was. He was drowning in the memories of his time serving for his King and Country in a war that had damaged him (and her, if she were to be honest) beyond recognition. The man he was now was suffocated by the remembrance of the situations experienced long ago by the man he had been back there, but that he no longer was.

Funny, how a sound or a smell or a simple thing found in the ups and downs of everyday life like a motorcar malfunctioning could take you back to the deepest pit in hell so easily, despite years of effort put in in attempts to leave all that behind (as much as humanly possible). All gone in the time it takes for an engine to collapse.

 

“Here we are,” Phryne announced the moment she closed the door behind them (not without some difficulty, since her arms were rather occupied supporting the almost dead weight of the inspector).

 

“T-thank you,” She could tell he was trying to pull himself together, appeared braver and more recovered than he was actually feeling. “Thank you, Miss Fisher,” he managed to say without stammering. She noticed a little colour was returning to his cheeks (his skin still looked like ash, hands still shaking violently, though), and that he was somewhat more relaxed now that they were at his home, surrounded by things he knew and loved.

 

Phryne had to make an effort not to dwell on the thought that she wished she was among the comforts that he knew and loved that made him feel better, protected, safe. It hurt not being able to, but the crude realization that she could have probably counted herself among the important people in his life three months ago but now couldn’t, hurt even more. The idea that Jack was still important to her even if she swore up and down that he wasn’t was one she did not want to entertain at all, and yet there it was, persistently nagging her, tugging at her heartstrings until it made them ache.

 

Jack sat down on the sage green leather sofa in the small sitting room. The house, Phryne suspected, had been bought by the inspector after the divorce. She could tell no woman had ever lived there, and that the man that inhabited those cream wallpapers did so in a way that made you feel as though he had just arrived or was about to leave. She wondered if he had ever felt at home there, and the answer came almost instantly: Phryne was sure he felt more at home at City South, and that the sitting room they were currently in held no more meaning than that of a place to go between long shifts and to save some face: after all, no one would deem it proper that a senior detective inspector stayed the night at his office, asleep with his head on the desk on top of folders and folders of unsolved cases and photographs of evidence.

 

She sat by his side at the other end of the sofa, a good distance between them. Her natural instinct to take in every new place she visited and let her mind soak up the details was repressed by her need to make sure that he was all right. She knew he wasn’t, of course. Even if he wasn’t showing the same reaction as before, when he’d been sitting in front of the wheel of his broken motorcar, he was still far from all right. He sat there with his eyes fixed on the floor and a look on his face she had only seen once: the night he had bidden her farewell before closing the door on their personal partnership and personal relationship.

 

He looked defeated.

 

A couple of days ago she would have never imagined that before the week ended she’d find herself at the inspector’s home under such stressful, hard circumstances. But life was unpredictable - she didn’t know it, or would have it, any other way. It was what it was. So even if Phryne couldn’t tell if her presence was wanted or needed at all, she had made up her mind that she would be staying until she made sure he’d be fine on his own. That, or he’d have to explicitly ask her to go. Maybe not even after that. She knew firsthand what war flashbacks were like. She had been there. She had had them. She had seen their effect on both men and women. No one deserved to be alone in the aftermath of a revival of the hellish hole war had ripped from them all.

 

“Would you like a cup of tea, Jack?” she asked him gently.

 

“N-no. Y-yes.” He was stammering again, his gaze still fixed on the carpeted floor.

 

“Is that a no or a yes to the cup of tea, then?” Her tone was light, almost playful. It reminded her of the banter that had flown so naturally between them since the beginning, when he found her kneeling down by a corpse in the bathroom at the Andrews’ residence.

 

At this question, he seemed to snap out of the thoughts that consumed him. He looked up and at her with a vacant expression, his tone of voice free of any emotion when he made an observation:

 

“I think I should be offering you tea, Miss Fisher, seeing as you are a guest in my home.”                        

 

“Why? You don’t trust me around a kettle?”

 

She was hit in the stomach by her own words, and all of a sudden it was as though her lungs had been emptied of all oxygen. It sounded too much to the woman she had been around him before all hell broke loose. The lady detective that had befriended the police officer and joined him on his crime-solving adventures and inviting him to go along on hers. It was one thing to assist someone that was suffering from a war flashback after being once again traumatised by a violent event (and the bombings, the death of the children - there was a lot of violence in that from her point of view, and she hadn’t even been present in the train station at the time of the explosion.) She would have never left someone alone in that situation. She was caring by nature, and that was why she was still there, offering to make a strong cup of tea to help him feel better (or so she told herself).

 

But it was another thing to act and speak as if everything was all right between them and nothing had changed. Things had changed, there was no escaping that. The moment he had closed the door to Wardlow that night after his speech on how he couldn’t change who she was or ask her to change to justify his decision to give her up, that night something had drastically changed. She had had to live with those changes for the past three months and experienced different degrees of anger, petulance, disdain, disinterest, and (why not admit it) sadness. Phryne was acting as if he hadn’t stamped over the friendship she had so freely and generously offered him, as if he hadn’t broken her heart by leaving.

 

And yet she didn’t stop herself when she realized that. Because she also noticed how her banter seemed to help him relax. It could have been impossible to perceive, perhaps to someone that didn’t know Detective Inspector Jack Robinson well, but she did. His face and his expressions were like a map she could have traced from memory and with her eyes closed. She saw it, albeit brief, the change in his expressions, the relaxation of the muscles, the sparkle returning to the eyes that had been dull and opaque ever since the motorcar malfunction had scared him. She saw things in him she often wondered if anyone else ever had seen, if anyone else had paid enough attention to him as he seemed to do with everyone else..

 

So she didn’t stop herself either when the next words left her mouth, and she knew her brain (or had it been her heart?) had put them up there and made her tongue push them through her lips and out until the sound reached his ears with the only intention to help him relax further.

 

“I promise I make a very serious cup of tea. In fact, I made tea once, one day Mr. B was away visiting her sister and Dot was indisposed. A friend of Aunt Prudence’s coming over to discuss one of her charities, and I made tea for her. She didn’t complain. Well, she died that same night, natural causes they said, but she was an old woman so I am sure it didn’t have to do with the tea.”

 

It was all a tall tale, of course. She was making it all up - Mr B. being away on a visit to his sister, Dot’s illness, her aunt’s old, soon-to-be-a-corpse friend stopping by for tea to discuss a charity. She just wanted to make him laugh, see the spark she had grown accustomed to in their (however brief) time working together and that had been absent since the bombings had made their paths cross again. And when she saw it there for a second, his features became more relaxed than she’d seen them since the morning they had stood together in front of the car holding Gerty’s lifeless body. That was also when she realized that all of what she had been feeling lately- the anger, the sadness, the disbelief, the sense of betrayal and abandonment, even the whole idea that she was way beyond this and that he was an ungrateful friend that had not deserved her- were not pure, raw feelings in themselves, but the symptoms of something bigger, scarier, that she wasn’t sure she’d dare name.

 

The Honourable Phryne Fisher understood that she wouldn’t have walked out on him had the roles been reversed, had it been her driving like a madwoman to a crime scene expecting to find Jack’s body in front of a blood-stained wheel. Not because she was the bigger person, the more modern-minded one, the one that could easily accept what the other part had to offer without making a deal out of the differences between a traditional lifestyle and a not-so-traditional one. She was not walking out on him now after seeing that he made it safely to his home because it was in her nature to care for others- after all, she was a caring person- but this was deeper than that. It wasn’t merely anyone she was there with at the moment. It wasn’t just anyone she was determined to stay with no matter what.

 

She understood that she could never walk out on Jack Robinson under any circumstances because...

 

He was the exception to the rule.

 

He was still in her mind, in her veins, in her blood, omnipresent like a God she hadn’t chosen to believe in but believed in anyway. And now, he was here before her, in the flesh, after three months of absence and silence. The reunion had been overwhelming, to say the least, what with it being woven into a very serious case. But in that moment, sitting with him in his house, in silence, discussing who would make tea like an old married couple ( _no, no, no_ ) she felt more overwhelmed than she had at the hospital with the nurses and the wounded, or when they’d been at the interrogation room with the other detective, or when he had the war flashbacks outside Edwin’s house.

 

His voice lured her out of the foggy, complicated thoughts that had come with the realization of her true, unexpected feelings for the man that distance and time hadn’t gotten rid of (and possibly never would).

 

“I can make the tea myself,” Jack insisted. He tried to stand to his feet, but his legs were still shaking, and he fell back onto the couch a second later. He looked, once more, defeated. Almost ashamed of himself. Phryne noticed how he was avoiding to look her in the eyes.

 

“I think it’d be better if I made the tea, Inspector.” He said nothing, and he didn’t look at her. She let out a breath she didn’t notice she’d been holding, and decided to address things by their name instead of tiptoeing around them like children that have just broken their mother’s favourite vase and don’t know where to hide the shattered pieces: “Jack, you don’t have to be ashamed about what happened outside the Stokes’ house….”

 

He cut her off drily.

 

“I know, Miss Fisher. Weren’t you about to make some tea?”

 

She looked at him for a second before she stood up and went to the small kitchen area. She didn’t say anything to him like she would have to any other person that spoke to her in that manner. She knew he was under a lot of stress and that he hadn’t meant to be so short. Life had taught her the difference between good and bad men, and she could easily see this for what it was: he was still shocked, and scared, and no matter how much he tried to deny it, she knew he was ashamed it had happened, and she’d dare say he was ashamed she had been there to witness it. She wasn’t justifying the way he had spoken to her, but she decided to give him some space and offer him a cup of tea before trying to talk to him once more.

 

Phryne didn’t have much experience in the kitchen, nor did she enjoy cooking and baking in the way dear Dot certainly showed, but it was true that she knew her way around a kettle. She was lucky enough to count with the help of a marvelous house staff, but she wasn’t useless and it had not been always like that. She had come from poverty, and she’d never forgotten that about herself or her family. It was by sheer chance and coincidence that her father had inherited a title. It could have gone to another person as easily if they hadn’t all died tragically from one ailment or another.

 

The kitchen was modest and impersonal, as if it was a part of a house that belonged to no one. There was a door there that led to the back garden, and a window above the sink.

 

She easily located the kettle, the saucers, the cups, and in no time the water was boiling. Phryne had made good use of the minutes spent there alone, and she had entertained herself peering outside the window above the sink. Jack had a beautiful garden that he kept with great work and effort, and the back of it was full of some of the most beautiful rosebushes she had ever seen. It was a sight to behold, and she guessed that even someone like her would be tempted to spend more time in this kitchen more often just to enjoy a view like that one, specially in the spring.

 

When she went back into the sitting room with a tray with the kettle, the cups and the saucers, he waited until she had placed it on the coffee table and sat back down on the couch by his side before he began to tak:

 

“When I heard the noise the motorcar made, it all came back to me in a matter of seconds. Or maybe I went back to it, I don’t know.” Phryne didn’t say anything, but he knew she was listening to him with all of her attention. It encouraged him to keep on talking while she served him the tea exactly the way he liked it, and then poured a cup for herself. “Not only the war, the trenches, and the suffering and pain I witnessed there… Those kids…” he trailed off, she said nothing. She waited patiently until he felt like he could speak again. She was in no rush, and she didn’t want him to feel like he was, either. “Those kids died, and I could do nothing to help them.” His eyes were once again fixed on his own hands. “I was too late. We were all too late. Just like in the war, you know?” He looked at her this time. “I imagine you must have gone through something like that, right? Being too late to help someone…”

 

She nodded her head in the affirmative. It had happened to her, both in the war and way before the conflict erupted and changed all life as they all knew it. What he was talking about, she had experienced it as a child when her sister had gone missing right under her nose, when she’d been too distracted with the circus act to pay attention to little Janey. By the time she had realized the girl was gone, it had been too late. The same could be said about the men she had tended to during the war: Phryne had driven that ambulance with reckless abandon, but some of them she had reached when it had been too late.

 

“I know the feeling too well, Inspector,” she admitted.

 

“It had been a while since I last had one of these… episodes,” he seemed unsure of what to call it. “I had them all the time after I came back.”

 

“We all did. I did, too.”

 

“I fought against them. I made them disappear. It took time, it took a lot of effort, but I made them go away. The victory came with a price, though. The war kept on taking from me after it ended, the men I knew and respected that died in the trenches or killed themselves when they came back home changed and damaged forever were not the only things the war took from me.” He was referring to his marriage, of course. She didn’t need to ask to know that, it was implicit. And he knew that she knew. He knew she understood, for who could understand him better than her. Miss Fisher always saw right through him and into the very essence of his soul like no one else ever did?

 

“What happened at the train station triggered your memory. You cannot blame yourself for that, Jack. The time I spent helping at the hospital afterwards triggered my memory, too. I am sure it was the same for Mac. I am sure it was the same for a lot of people. And then today you had a fright, and it was totally normal to react the way you did.”

 

“Did you react like I did when you heard the engine explode?” he asked her without expecting an answer. “I threw up and passed out when I had to tell that man his children were dead. It had never happened to me, and in my line of work I have had deliver difficult news to the victims’ families on several occasions. It never took a toll on me the way these children’s deaths have.”

 

“It was different this time, Jack. No one says it wasn’t.”

 

“You didn’t react any differently,” he insisted. “You did the job. You were there, you helped people. I was all night in the hospital, and the moment I’m back in the field to investigate, do something useful, the littlest thing triggers my memory and I am once again… there. In that hellish place. The war. The train station. Dead soldiers, dead children. It’s all the same. I could do nothing. I survived and they didn’t. I am alive and they are not.”

 

“Survivor’s guilt,” Phryne stated simply. “I’ve lived with that for a long time, Inspector. I still do,” she admitted. “Long before 1918.”

 

She saw realization flick like a flame in his eyes when he caught on what she was implying with her words.

 

“Your sister,” he said. “I am sorry.”

 

“You don’t have to be,” she assured him. “Your battle is no less important than mine, Jack.”

 

“It is more personal…”

 

“And war isn't? The death of innocent people at the hands of someone crazy enough to make four bombs go off isn’t?” She poured herself a second cup of tea. The kettle was empty now. She noticed Jack had barely touched his cup. “Drink up,” Phryne instructed him. “I promise you it is not poisonous.”

 

He humoured her and took a sip of his tea, that had gone slightly cold.

 

“Let me make you a fresh cup, Inspector,” she offered. “Cold tea will not agree with your empty stomach, and I don’t want to have to hear all about how my aptitudes in the kitchen did someone else harm.”

 

She took his cup and saucer and the kettle, and left the sitting room carrying the tray. When she found herself in the kitchen for the second time, she noticed something that hadn’t been there when she’d been making the tea.

 

There was a brown envelope on the kitchen floor. It looked as though someone had slipped it under the door that led to the back of the garden while they had been in the sitting room talking and drinking the tea (or at least she had been drinking the tea). It was addressed to Jack, but his name wasn’t written in ink. Whomever had slipped the envelope under the door had taken the time to cut all ten letters of his name from a newspaper and then paste them together so it read:

 

**J** a **_ck_ ** rO **B** _i_ **N** s _o_ **N**

 

She left the tray forgotten on the kitchen table and found something to grab the envelope without tainting what she considered was potential evidence, just like the note someone had slipped into her newspaper copy that morning. so she’d find it. She found a paper towel and went back into the livingroom. Instead of the promised fresh cup of tea, she had something much more interesting for the inspector.

 

“Someone slipped this under the door that connects your kitchen to your back garden, Jack,” she said, and a part of her was satisfied to notice his reaction was more similar to what she would have expected of him during a normal case. His hands weren’t shaking anymore, and his eyes shone like a hawk’s when he turned them towards the envelope she was holding in her hand wrapped in the paper towel.

 

“You just found this?”

 

“Yes. It wasn’t there when I made the tea. They must have left it while we were here talking.”

 

“Miss Fisher, could you please put on driving gloves and open this envelope?”

 

“Of course,” she said. She found them where she’d left them after they’d arrived at his home in the pocket of her coat.

 

Inside there was a sheet of paper the colour of parchment. It was different from the paper they had used for the note she had received, but this message had also been typewritten, and it was a children’s rhyme. Some of the letters were underlined.

 

> Bah, Bah, a black Sheep,  
>  Have y o u any Wool ?  
>  Yes merry I Have,  
>  Three Bags full ,  
>  Two for my  Master,  
>  One for my Dame,  
>  None for the Little  Boy  
>  That cries in the lane

 

“Olly, olly…” Jack whispered to himself after they read it in silence at least three times.

 

Phryne completed the phrase their anonymous writer had left incomplete.

 

“Olly, olly, oxen free.”

 

“It’s a catchphrase,” Jack said. “Children sing it when they play hide and seek.”

 

“Janey and I used to sing it.”

 

“So did my friends from school and I,” the inspector said.

 

“What do you think this person is trying to tell us, Jack? That they are playing hide and seek with us? That they want to be found? Remember the note they slipped inside my newspaper: they hinted they’ll act again if they’re not stopped.”

 

“Why leave this in my house?” Jack asked out loud.

 

“The same reason they made sure the first note got to me,” she said as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “They know I work with City South. They know we work together. They want our attention. They want us to find them, whomever _they_ are.”

 

“Why us?” He insisted.

 

She felt like she had the answer to this:

 

“Because they like to play, and so do we, don’t we? And they want to play with us.”

 

They sat there in silence contemplating the note, alone with their thoughts but together as partners for the first time in three months. 

 


	11. Chapter 11

_“You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war.”_

Napoleon Bonaparte

 

By the time the Honourable Phryne Fisher returned to her home in St. Kilda it was well past midnight. The Inspector and her had spent the rest of the evening talking about the questions they would ask young Toby Fletcher first thing the following morning. The most pressing ones were about the newspaper copy he had insisted Edwin Stokes had to deliver specifically at Wardlow. Why had the kid done that? Who had told him there had been complaints about the papers delivered by Edwin? Who had given him the copy to deliver the morning after the bombings? Had Toby believed he was helping the younger hawker, or had he known all the while that something else was going on?

 

Being the practical man that he was, Jack had made a list of the things they already knew, the things they suspected, and the things they had to find out. Phryne was more of a spur-of-the-moment person- perhaps it had to do with the fact that for several years she’d seen no other escape than to make do with whatever she had at arms’ length. But she had to admit that Jack’s organised ways were as useful as her improvised ones. Besides, it did her good to see him focused on the work, sharing theories with her, writing down bits of information with his impeccable calligraphy that was so different to hers.

 

As the hours passed and they discussed the case, he had become notably calmer. When she left the house, his hands had stopped shaking altogether and the shadows from the past that had been haunting him were nowhere to be found in his eyes. He looked tired, and so did she. They both were exhausted. But he had looked more like the man he'd been before this ordeal than she'd seen him in the last couple of days. He looked more like the man she remembered being partners with.

 

It had felt like the old times, and she couldn’t help but wonder if he’d found it as comforting as she herself had. She didn’t know what prospect scared her more: if he had, or if he hadn’t.

 

She had telephoned Cec and Bert from Jack’s house and asked them to see about the Inspector’s motorcar. Jack had insisted it wasn’t necessary and that he could take care of it. But the lady detective had been, as always, more insisting. Or perhaps he had been too tired to argue further with her, emotionally and physically drained as a consequence of his war memories assaulting him earlier that day.

 

He would never admit it, but Miss Fisher’s presence had anchored him to a world he’d felt himself being ripped from. She had known exactly how to act. He knew it would be unfair to draw any comparisons, but his former wife had never known what to say or do to calm him during these episodes. They had been very frequent several years ago, when he had just returned home. Perhaps it was because Rosie had never come face to face with such horrors, but Miss Fisher had. She had been there, and seen the same things, and recovered from the same violence and absurdity. His hell had been (was) hers, too. They hadn’t gone through it together, but they had come out alive and damaged just the same.

 

When he reflected back on it in the early hours of the morning, while he lay awake on his bed waiting for dawn to break, he realised that breaking down in front of Miss Fisher hadn’t been as mortifying. He would have expected to feel shame, to feel less of a man. He would have been scared of her seeing his vulnerability, the raw, infected skin of his emotional wounds shining red and bright and still unable to hear after all those years. And yet it hadn’t happened. He had broken down with her as the only witness, but the world had not stopped turning on its axis as a consequence. She was still there for him.

 

He tried to convince himself he didn’t sleep that night because the case of the bombings would not leave him alone. Blaming the current scenario- the death of innocent people, the perpetrator contacting him and Miss Fisher directly with those mysterious notes delivered at their houses- was easier than admitting to what he was actually feeling.

 

His survivor's guilt was now mixed with a strong pang of remorse related to something he’d done three months ago.

 

Miss Fisher had acted like any decent, kind person would have. It was in her nature, and she would have done the same for anyone else, whether she knew them very well or not. That was true. But she’d also acted as his partner. As his friend. She had shown him that even though a lot of bad blood had flowed between the, she still had in her the capacity to care for him the ways friends do.

 

Perhaps she had never stopped caring.

 

He knew _he_ hadn’t.

 

It didn’t matter that he felt for her something deeper, greater and more complex than friendship. She didn’t care that he’d walked out on their relationship because he wanted more than what she was ready to offer. All that between them was forgotten the moment Jack needed her. And not a flicker of a doubt had crossed those beautiful blue eyes he couldn’t push away from his thoughts.

 

In separate beds, in different houses, in two neighbourhoods that had little to do one with the other, Detective Inspector Jack Robinson and the Honourable Phryne Fisher tossed and turned that night. They both thought of the dangers that lay ahead, and wondered where the writer of the letters was and whether they were planning another attack. But they also thought about each other, and the misunderstandings that consisted of  the wall they both hid behind, and that somehow they’d managed to break holes into during the time they’d been partners.

 

The idea that he had made a mistake by behaving so cowardly in the face of rejection tortured him.

 

The fear that she had allowed herself to fall in love with someone that would need her to commit fully was what kept her awake.

 

Restlessness didn’t have a place in her beautiful face the next day when they met to talk with the Fletcher boy. He wondered how she managed it. Adversity and worry never dimmed her light, and so the beauty of the soul and spirit she housed within her body always shone brighter than the sun. He’d never met anyone quite Miss Fisher before, and he doubted he ever would.

 

She knew very well how to hide, the help of wonderful dear Dot and the magical properties of make-up were her allies in disguising her lack of rest. She knew she didn’t look it, but she wasn’t well rested. Neither was he. His suit was pressed, his hair was impeccable, he was freshly shaved- no one would have guessed otherwise, but she would have bet her beloved Hispano-Suiza that he couldn’t have slept a minute longer than her. She knew him: a case like this one, the letters- those things wouldn’t have given his mind a minute’s peace. At least they hadn’t given _hers_ a minute’s peace.

 

(She felt selfish in doing so, but Phryne wondered if the inspector had thought about her. And if he did, what part did it play in his restless hours spent tossing and turning?)

 

Edwin had told them this older kid was always the first to arrive every morning. Miss Fisher and the inspector decided to arrive before all the newspaper hawkers. None of them were there yet. It was just the two of them near the back door to the old publishing house building.

 

“Whomever is behind this,” the lady detective said for what felt like the tenth time since the night before, “knows both our addresses and our case-solving activities. They know our moves, too. They knew who to approach so I'd get the note delivered inside my newspaper. And if they weren't expecting you at home yesterday evening when they slipped that other note, they were quick to react and adapt their plan. They slipped it under your kitchen door after making sure no one was around. They weren't heard, they weren't seen.”

 

“It almost sounds as if you admired their ways, Miss Fisher.”

 

“Don't you know, Inspector, what they say about the benefits of knowing your enemy? You out of all people should be aware of the advantages in studying the criminals’ arts and techniques to better catch them.”

 

“So you think there's method to their madness?”

 

She smiled at the Shakespeare reference, and a fluttery sensation grazed her stomach. After all of what had been happening, it was comforting to hear him quote his favourite author. Phryne found herself thinking that boundaries between them sometimes got blurred for the both of them. There were moments in which she could have sworn not a second had passed since before they solved Gerty’s murder. But she knew, and felt, different. There were stains that couldn't be easily erased, no matter how hard you tried or how much you wanted to succeed. If she took some of the finest China she owned and smashed it on the floor, patience and repentance wouldn't be enough to mend it and leave it how it once looked when it was unscratched.

 

He had broken something the night he chose to walk away, and the confusing, mixed feelings and thoughts she was having now were not enough to fix it.

 

“Did I lose you there, Miss Fisher?” the inspector asked.

 

He knew she was never silent unless something was wrong. He fully knew _what_ was wrong between them, and yet he asked the question anyway. And the wording, too! _Did I lose you_ , he asked! There were a million things she could reply to that, but none came to mind. Perhaps because even if something had been broken by him, she was not as sure as a couple of days before that he had completely, irrevocably lost her.

 

“I slept very little last night,” she confided to him while they waited for Toby Fletcher. It wasn't a lie, and it was a perfectly acceptable answer to his question. Not that she owed him any explanations, or anyone for that matter.

 

“I didn't sleep very well last night, either.”

 

He never knew the words about to leave her mouth. Her lips were already parted, but whatever she was about to say was replaced by her reaction when Miss Fisher spotted a tall, red-headed boy. He was the first to arrive, just like Edwin told them.

 

“Toby Fletcher?” Jack called his name as they approached him. The boy looked at them with a curious expression. He had blue eyes and a lot of red hair sprouting from his head. His long nose was covered in freckles. Some bigger ones covered his pale cheeks. “My name is Detective Inspector Jack Robinson. This is the Honourable Phryne Fisher, lady detective.” Phryne nodded her head to the boy, and he did the same. “We would like to ask you a couple of questions about a note Miss Fisher received yesterday and that could be related to another ongoing investigation of ours. The note was slipped inside the newspaper copy that was delivered at her home in St. Kilda.”

 

“I don't deliver Miss Fisher’s newspaper. Edwin Stokes does,” Toby said calmly.

 

“We know. We spoke to Edwin.” Phryne did her best to sound friendly. She didn't like dealing with children. It was one thing talking to Jane about history lessons, and school, and science- she was the exception to the rule. But she didn't know this boy. Things with Edwin had gone well the day before, so she supposed she wasn't as bad with kids as one would think. It didn't meant she enjoyed or looked forward to their company, though.

 

“Edwin told us about how you helped him yesterday. You heard about complaints made against Edwin and were scared for your friend?”

 

“We aren't friends,” Toby corrected Jack. “But I know he don't have it easy at home. His dad died. He needs the job. To help his mom, you know. And his siblings.”

 

“It is very nice and considerate of you to help someone in need, Toby,” Jack said. “Who told you about these complaints?”

 

Instead of answering the inspector’s question, Toby made one of his own:

 

“Is Edwin in trouble with the coppers?” The expression of natural curiosity that had been on his face then they first approached him was gone. He had his eyebrows raised questioningly, instead.

 

“No, he is not.” Phryne assured him. “We promise you that if you talk to us and help us by answering our questions you won't be getting Edwin in any trouble.”

 

Jack hoped it wouldn't take them much longer to convince Toby to talk to them. He seemed like a good kid and he reminded Jack of when he himself had been that age. He wouldn't have ratted on another good kid either. But if Toby didn't agree to answer to their questions soon, then more people would start to arrive. If any of the other newspapers hawkers of the workers at the newspaper had something to do with the notes, the inspector thought it was best if they didn't see him and Miss Fisher there.

 

“We just want to know where you got the idea to help Edwin from,” Jack said to him.

 

“One of the workers at the publishing house saw me here early the other day. I'm always early. Always the first one here. I don't know what his name is,” Toby told them. “He asked me if I knew a hawker called Edwin Stokes. I told him I did. He told me he knew the kid had trouble at home, money problems… I told him I knew. He said a wealthy lady in St. Kilda had complaints about the newspaper, and that he didn't want Edwin to be sacked because some…”

 

Toby stopped talking. He realised the lady that man had been talking about was standing right in front of him.

 

“I guess that man didn't have many nice things to say about me,” Phryne commented with a reassuring smile.

 

“I know what it is like when your dad dies. My dad is dead. And my mom, too. I live with my aunt and uncle,” Toby told them. “I deliver newspapers to help at home. These are difficult times. The kid needs the money. More than many of us here, from what I've heard. So when that man asked me if I could help him help Edwin, I said yes.”

 

Both adults were surprised at how mature and educated Toby sounded for a boy his age. He couldn't have been more than fourteen, and yet he showed more common sense and empathy than others that were older. Jack thought that it would be a hard blow to the kid to find out someone had used him for their own benefit while making him believe he'd be helping Edwin.

 

“What else did he tell you?” Jack encouraged him to keep on talking.

 

“He told me he wanted to make sure that there weren't any other complaints from the client in St. Kilda, and that he had set apart a newspaper he himself had checked to make sure nothing was wrong with it. No ink smudges, no missed sections. I had to give it to Edwin, explain about the complaints and tell him to make sure he delivered that copy at the lady in St. Kilda.”

 

“Did this man tell you why he couldn't help Edwin himself? Did he tell you whyhe needed you?” Phryne inquired.

 

“He said he couldn't do it himself because if word got out he was helping out one of the hawkers he got in trouble. He said he knew he could trust me,” Toby said proudly “because he's seen me around and I'm a responsible boy.”

 

“And you'd never seen him before yesterday?” Jack asked.

 

“No. But I don't know anyone at the publishing house. And I don't remember his face,” Toby anticipated the next question the crime solving partners were going to ask him. “It was really early and dark, I couldn't get a good look at his face.”

 

“He just gave you the paper, nothing else?” Phryne wanted to know.

 

“Yes, just the paper.” Tony confirmed. “Is he in trouble?”

 

“We don't know, Toby.” Jack was quick to change the subject. “Thank you for your time. You've been of great help.”

 

“Toby,” Phryne said before they left “I will give you my card.” She took one out of her purse. “It's got my telephone number and home address in it. If you see this man again, please don't mention him you've talked to us. But take a good look at him and ask him his name if you can. And then telephone us or drop by my house in St. Kilda.”

 

Toby took the card she was offering him and nodded his head.

 

They said their goodbyes and left just as the other young hawkers started to arrive on their bikes.

 

It was still fairly early when the inspector and Miss Fisher greeted the constable working the front desk at City South Police Station and asked to see Detective Inspector Walker. He had given them his permission to investigate the first note if they believed it could take them somewhere other than a couple of kids with a weird, morbid sense of humor trying to pull a prank.

 

“Well, if this is a prank after all,” Miss Fisher had told Jack on their way to City South “then whomever is behind it had a sense of humor much more complex than an adolescent’s. Not to mention means, information and logistics.”

 

Jack agreed with her, and he hoped that once he learned about the second note and heard the testimonies from Edwin Stokes and Toby Fletcher about the delivery of the first, Walker would agree this was not a boring kid's doing. Jack and Miss Fisher believed they were being contacted by the culprit for some reason, and they now had more than enough to convince Walker of this.

 

“Robinson,” the man said for all greeting when they entered his office. “Lady Fisher,” he added when he saw her, a nod of his head accompanying the incorrect title.

 

“Honourable Miss Fisher,” she corrected him with a polite smile.

 

Walker looked exhausted. His desk was covered with several papers that were piling up. He had sweat stains in his dress shirt and the aspect of someone that hadn't gone home in several hours. He must have worked all night.

 

“Constable Sheffield said you had some new information to share.” Walker sat down on the chair behind his desk and with a gesture of his hand invited them to do the same on the ones opposite to it.

 

They told him about Edwin and Toby, and then they showed him the second note. Walker listened to them in silence and he paid attention to everything they said. The man could be very different from Jack in a lot of aspects, and they didn't always see eye to eye, but Jack liked that about him: he was a good listener, he took everyone's opinion in consideration, and he knew how to manage teamwork. Not everyone was good at that, he had to give his colleague that.

 

“Well,” Walker said “these kids and the second note certainly change things.”

 

Jack noticed from the corner of his eye how Miss Fisher was having a hard time trying (and failing spectacularly) to suppress the smile of satisfaction that was tugging at her lips. Oh, how she loved proving people wrong, that woman! He couldn't blame her, though. He like being right as the next man. Walker might have dismissed the note at first, but at least he was open minded enough to let him (Jack) follow a lead he considered was worth it. And now that they had a clearer picture he was admitting he had been wrong. Jack thought that was respectable, to say the least.

 

“Look, Inspector Robinson, Miss Fisher,” he began “I have no problem with you too investigating this if you want to. Miss Fisher, I can't stop you from doing whatever your heart wishes to- you are not employed here, I have no say over what you do or don't do.”

 

“Naturally,” Miss Fisher agreed. “But then again no one does. I do what I want when I want to in spite of what others may have to say.”

 

“In regards to Inspector Robinson,” Walker continued without paying much attention to what Miss Fisher had just said “You are not in charge of this case, but the department needs and appreciates all the help it can get under these terrible circumstances. Since you were at the site of one of the explosions and you were in hospital afterwards, you are in your right to ask for whatever time off you need should you see it fit since you have plenty of unused vacation days. I know it's not the case.” Walker was quick to add “I know you want to work this case.”

 

“I do, Inspector Walker. And I think Miss Fisher and I are onto something worth following.”

 

“There is a reason why the people behind this insist on contacting Inspector Robinson and I.”

 

“Whatever reasons those may be, Miss Fisher, I propose you and Inspector Robinson investigate them. I don't have any objections to you working that side of the investigation.” He looked at Miss Fisher, “If your less than orthodox methods can get us to them sooner, fine. I won’t object to that. If Inspector Robinson wishes to work with you, it’s fine by me. We can cross-share what we find. The sooner we catch them, the better.”

 

He took a sip out of a cup of what looked like very cold tea. Then he went on talking:

 

“My men and I have some strong leads that point to a group of former soldiers that came back with several mental health issues. There have been incidents in Sydney and in Perth- nothing like what happened here, of course. Some were minor, some others weren’t. We think they may be the ones behind the bombings. They probably want the people that stayed behind to experience the hell and terror us soldiers went through.”

 

“It is possible that that’s their motive,” Miss Fisher agreed. Then she addressed Jack, who was sitting by her side “What do you think, Inspector?”

 

Jack had gone quiet and silent again. He had a far-off look on his face, as if he were deep in thought.

 

He had been to war. He had suffered, and he had seen others die covered by dirt, and blood, and mud. His life had changed drastically afterwards, and the parts of him that were damaged never went back to being quite the same as the day before he embarked en route to Europe. Many men had gone through that. They all had brought demons back home with them. It was hard, and it was unfair. But he couldn’t believe anyone would justify killing innocent citizens, children among them, the same people they had been protecting when they went to the trenches, because they wished upon them the same horror they had survived. What he had seen, heard and felt in the war, and the consequences he battled against daily- he didn’t wish that on absolutely anyone. He never could.

 

“Jack?”

 

He heard Miss Fisher call his name softly again. The sound of her voice lured him out of his thoughts.

 

“What do you think?” she repeated the question once more.

 

What he thought they’d never know, for in that exact same moment one of the Constables on duty entered Inspector Walker’s office abruptly. He looked agitated, and the three occupants of the room could have guessed what he said right before the words left his mouth:

 

“Sir! There’s been another one!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The wonderful @MissingMissFisher made an awesome job of proofreading this chapter. I couldn't love her more.


	12. Chapter 12

_“Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.”_   


Otto von Bismarck

  


The morning after the third attack to the city of Melbourne, Detective Inspector Jack Robinson dropped a cup and a saucer while he was trying to pour himself some tea. The same had happened an hour before when he’d attempted the same mundane task that shouldn’t have taken him more than two minutes under normal circumstances. But the circumstances were not normal anymore for the senior policeman. His vision was blurred and he could not help the shaking of both his hands. The chest ache and breathing difficulties had returned in full force, and he was unable to make himself a goddamned cup of tea.

 

The Royal Arcade bombing had left several dozens of dead and wounded in its wake, and an alarmed population demanded answers and that arrests were made before the culprits took more innocent lives. The feeling of safety was a luxury, a privilege that had been taken away from them violently.

 

Jack understood them. He understood what it felt like, as many other former soldiers did. He’d lived through it- the uncertainty and the fear, not knowing if that day would be his last. The enemy could be hiding anywhere and he’d be merciless when he found you (because there wasn’t a moment that you didn’t think they _would_ find you. It was not a matter of _if_ , it was a matter of _when_.) Rooted to your very core, the fear stayed afterwards and grew stronger after every survived attack. Fear fed on your own luck and on the deceased’s disgrace. The longer you stayed alive when others didn’t, the more you were sure you would be next. Jack was very familiar with these thoughts. He’d had them during the war. He’d had them after. He was having them now, awaken within him by the events of the last days.

 

The storm brewing in his mind, the memories, and the anger he felt that they were not close to stopping whomever were responsible- it all was affecting him on a physical level. Nightmares and night sweats when he slept (even if for a scarce quarter of an hour), torturing flashbacks when he didn’t. (But weren’t nightmares and flashbacks all the same?) He couldn’t make himself a bloody cup of tea without breaking the china, for God’s sake! His body was acting out in behalf of his overstimulated psyche. The scenery at the Royal Arcade, the hurt and destruction his eyes had seen, was etched in his retinas; eyes open or closed, the images refused to leave.  

 

His senses, his flesh, and bones, and his whole body had betrayed him the moment he’d arrived at the arcade with Miss Fisher, Inspector Walker and several more officers. The sights and smells, the collective madness, the cries for help of the wounded and the stillness of those that would never breathe again were too similar to what he had experienced at the train station days ago. He froze at the scene. It had never happened to him before, not even on the most gruesome, complicated cases. His profession had always been his passion, the fuel that moved him forward in a world that he viewed differently since he’d come back from Europe.

 

But this one case was different. He was different. And who had made him change? The bohemian, black-haired beauty with a fierceness and a wit to match, that was who. She had noticed immediately how the madness at the arcade was affecting him, took him aside and breathed in and out with him for a couple of minutes until he calmed down (all done with such grace and dignity he could have sworn no one had noticed). His life resembled little of what it’d been like before he met her. And he wasn’t sure whether it was a good thing or a bad one.

 

Her hand on his shoulder while they breathed in and out in sync had anchored him to the present. It wasn’t an ideal present, of course, but at least it wasn’t the war flashbacks. Without so much as a word on her part, Miss Fisher had helped him regain his focus. Then, as they worked side by side with Inspector Walker and the officers, she had kept a close eye on him and wordlessly reminded him to breathe in and out every time she noticed his thoughts drifting away to darker places. The madness that followed all former soldiers never truly left him, but Miss Fisher’s presence kept it at bay.

 

Walker and his men knew how the bombs were being made, which led to several arrests and interrogations. All of the men they arrested were former soldiers working menial jobs when not completely unemployed. Most of them had had run-ins with the law due to their heavy drinking and agitated behaviour. Most of them moved in low social cycles where it wouldn’t have been strange to find someone as angry as them and with skills to build potent homemade bombs to boot. But all of them had alibis that checked for each and every one of the attacks, and there wasn’t evidence strong enough against any of them. The interrogations didn’t lead them to new suspects, either. They were advised not to leave town and stay where they could be easily found if City South needed to talk to them again.

 

Miss Fisher had suggested they bring in Toby Fletcher to see if he recognized any of them as the man he had talked to the morning after the first bombing, but he and Miss Fisher couldn’t find the kid or his home address anywhere. They would have to go to the publishing house first thing in the morning and find the kid there when he went to pick up the newspapers for delivery. With Jack’s motorcar being in the shop, Miss Fisher had offered him to pick him up in her Hispano-Suiza.

 

When he got home very late at night, dead on his feet after a whole day’s investigation, he avoided going to bed because he knew the moment he closed his eyes he would be trapped in the hell that had been kept at arm’s length by Miss Fisher all day (the credit was hers, whether he liked it or not.) He tried to make himself some tea, but dropped both cup and saucer. He cut his shaking hands when he picked up the pieces and cleaned the floor. The same happened the following morning. It was alarming, the rate at which he was reverting back to an older version of himself.

 

He hadn’t slept the night before, just like he didn’t sleep when he’d been back home right after the end of the war. The wheels in his head wouldn’t stop turning. It hurt. His eyes hurt. His hands hurt from shaking so much. Even his teeth hurt. His muscles, his head, his bones, his skin- he’d spent the whole night wishing he was someone else, or somewhere else, where he couldn’t be reached and touched and beaten up cruelly by memories both fresh and rotten.

 

At that moment, he could almost admit how he had also wished for _her_ to be there with him. Anchoring him down. Reminding him not to be afraid of shadows, old or new. In the face of torturing uncertainty, he was only certain of the hold she had over him: she could both harm and soothe him in equal measures, and even when fully aware of how easily she could destroy him with a single word or look, she always chose to save him. From the past. From the shadows. From the ghosts. From himself. And even from her. Because he now knew that, in a way, a lot of the things she did, she did them to protect him from the heartache and pain she thought herself capable of causing him.

 

He didn’t know if he should hate her for that, or love her even more. He didn’t know if it was possible to love someone any more than he loved her, but then again she was constantly surprising him by giving him new reasons to fall even harder, deeper, into the madness that his feelings had become.

 

In all the confusion that was eating at him with the violence of a monster (and weren’t inner monsters often the worst kind?), he found himself kneeling on the kitchen floor trying to pick up the broken china. For a minute he couldn’t tell whether it was still the night before, for the situation was so similar and he still felt so weakened and so shocked that it was as if the hours in between had not gone by at all. There was fresh blood on his hands, too. And hadn't he been kneeling on the floor with blood on his hands the night before? Hadn't he been kneeling on the ground with his whole body covered in someone else's blood, that of another soldier's, of someone's child, when he'd been in the war years ago and then not so long ago in a crowded train station?

 

He didn't know where he was anymore, or whose blood stained his hands, if it was a little or if it was a lot. All he knew was the pain, the echoes of the tragedies he'd lived through ringing in his ears and attacking him even though he was in a silent room. All he knew were the pins and needles in his limbs, the numbness that wasn't such because he could feel it everywhere and it was maddening.

 

As he laid curled up in a ball on the floor, shell-shocked and collapsed under the weight of his suffering and his triggers, he focused on the only person he wanted and needed. At the same time, she was the very same person whom he wished would never have to see him like that.

 

He didn't hear her when she picked the lock to let herself inside his home. He didn't hear her calling out his name apprehensively. He was deafened and blinded by the imaginary hell that engulfed him, so he didn't see or feel when she knelt down beside him on the floor, staining the white trousers she was wearing.

 

It was not the first time he found himself in a situation where he had no control over his own body, his own thoughts, totally unaware of his surroundings and defenseless at the mercy of the consequences of the things men did to each other in the name of their beliefs. (But was he defenseless if she was there? Even if he had no idea he was no longer alone in his kitchen, was he defenseless if he had him to cradle him to her warm body whilst he sobbed and shook like a leaf?)

 

These symptoms had been common those first years after the war. And now they were back. It was all back in full force. The only difference between then and now was that he had a stronger pillar to hold onto. He didn’t want to be unfair with Rosie- she’d done the best she could with the little she had, and she’d really tried at first. No one could say she hadn’t tried- he wouldn’t let anyone say she hadn’t tried. But the truth was that in this new outburst of hellish memories and sensations he had by his side someone that had lived through it. They weren’t together in the way he and Rosie had been, and he knew that they never would. But she was there nonetheless. As a partner. As a friend. Did he deserve this? Did he deserve her? After walking out on her like he did when he got too scared, did he deserve any of this?

 

She had to think he did, for she calmed him down, told him to breathe in and out (she actually breathed in and out with him), ran her hands through his matted, sweaty hair while she whispered reaffirming words in his temporarily deaf ears. When it all passed and he came back up from the deepest pit in hell, he would not remember any of it, although the physical sensations of terror and shell-shock would remain as a reminder of where he’d been and where he could so easily get dragged right back into when he least expected it. He wouldn’t remember who calmed him or how, because he never did. But he would come out of it feeling safer than he ever did after one of those episodes before.

 

When he didn’t know her.

 

When he didn’t have her.

 

When he didn’t love her.

 

She cleaned the cuts in his hands and dressed them with first aid supplies she found in the small bathroom down the hall. She’d maneuvered the dead weight of his body to make him sit on the sofa, first. And then she tended to his wounds with the same softness and carefulness that went into everything she did. He was in no state to rationalize it, but she made him feel safe. She guided him away from the demons and into a present that may have been somber but that it was, at least for the moment, a little bit less darker than the one he retreated to when the flashbacks assaulted him.

 

When he came to it, he was sitting on the sofa with his face, neck and clothes soaked in cold sweat. His hair was sticking to his forehead, his limbs were still trembling slightly, and his shaky hands were dressed in white cotton cloth. He was breathing with some difficulty and his heart was hammering violently against his tight chest, but he didn’t feel as if he was going to die at any second, and he was aware of his surroundings.

 

And he was aware of the woman kneeling on the floor in front of him.

 

Miss Fisher had a wet cloth in one hand and a small soup bowl with warm water in the other. She was washing the sweat off his face and neck with such delicacy one could have thought she was restoring a work of art instead of tending to a broken, perturbed man. She had seen many men in his same position before, during and after the war. She was no stranger to trauma like his. Nothing he could have done or said while he was lost in the flashbacks could mortify her or push her away any more than his idiotic behaviour that night after the Haynes’ case. She was acting out of instinct and compassion, because that was exactly what she did and how she was. Just like a couple of days back when he’d been scared by the malfunctioning of his motorcar, she was now aiding him because it was the right thing to do. It wasn’t personal. It didn’t have to mean anything.

 

Then why in the bloody hell did it mean so much to him? Why was he desperate to hold onto her and get lost in her warm embrace? He had never done that with any of the people that had helped him during or after the war. He had never craved physical comfort, intimacy. And yet now he did. Because she was there. Because he wanted her, needed her. Because he loved her, and he was falling for the naive, childish notion that love can heal and conquer all, even if one-sided and unrequited.

 

“Miss Fisher,” His voice sounded hoarse, dry. He wondered if he’d been screaming. He had been known to do that when he had episodes. It had always scared Rosie. She had ended up locking herself in their room and weeping for hours one time. If he had become a screaming beast whilst battling his demons, it hadn’t scared Miss Fisher away. He didn’t want to draw comparisons. He knew he shouldn’t.

 

He coughed and tried make his voice sound clearer. He attempted to say her name again:

 

“Miss Fisher…”

 

“Shhh, Jack,” she soothed him.  

 

And then, as if he were a puppet on a string and she the expert puppeteer, she guided him to his bedroom. He tried to protest, but the words never left his mouth. Or if they did, they were an incomprehensible noise that made sense to no one. And even if they had made sense, even if he had managed to say something coherent in a language they both spoke, she would have ignored him and have things go her way. She was a force one was better off not fighting, specially in the vulnerable, weakened state he was in.

 

It was surreal. In all of the scenarios he’d ever dared to imagine the Honourable Phryne Fisher stepping through the threshold of his bedroom (and he had imagined them more times than it was healthy or proper to admit even to himself) to see that he was coming undone, it was not in this way. This was not at all how he would have liked her to enter a room no other human being but he himself had ever set foot in. He had moved into that house after he and Rosie separated, and he had never had a woman visit. She was the first. She was the first in regard of so many things when it came to him. And she was the first in this, too. It was not the scenario he would have chosen, it was under circumstances he knew he would always regret, that they were not entering his bedroom to consummate physically the burning passion that had been brewing between the two of them ever since they met in the Andrews’ bathroom. But they were there, in his room, together. And he was coming undone. It hurt to think, his body hurt, and he was putty in her hands.

 

(Come to think of it, when had he not been putty in her hands?)

 

She had him lay on the bed, and he did so without protesting much because he didn’t have  an ounce of strength left in him. They always took a lot out of him, the flashback episodes. Miss Fisher put a pillow under his throbbing head, and then she left. Against his better judgement, he wanted to ask her to stay. But, once again, Jack found himself unable to speak. He heard her roam about the small bathroom, looking for something. When she came back by his side, she had a glass of water and some painkillers with her.

 

“Come on, Jack. This will make you feel better,” she said whilst cupping the back of his head in the hand that wasn’t holding the glass of water. She helped him take the painkillers. “Everything will be all right, Jack,” she whispered to him as she kneeled by the bed. Her long, delicate fingers ran through his damped, sticky hair. It was calming, and his eyelids dropped on their own accord, and a bliss he thought he’d never experience again took over. And he believed her. For a second, he believed everything would be all right: the bombings, his life, his health, his mind, his heart. Miss Fisher’s presence and her voice wrapped him in a sense of calmness that made him believe everything would, indeed, be all right.

 

The last conscious thought he had was that he hoped his damped, sticky hair did not feel too disgusting on the soft skin of the tip of her fingers.

 

And then he was claimed by sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would like to thank you all for being so patient with me. I had trouble writing this story, but thanks to @MissingMissFisher I worked out how to continue. The next chapter is in the works and I promise you it will be posted soon.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would like to thank you all for being so patient with me. And I would like to thank @MissingMissFisher for her encouragement to find once again a voice within myself worth of Jack and Phryne's story.

“ _We don't even know how strong we are until we are forced to bring that hidden strength forward. In times of tragedy, of war, of necessity, people do amazing things. The human capacity for survival and renewal is awesome._ ”

 

Isabel Allende

 

In the course of her adult life, the Honourable Phryne Fisher had shared a bed with many men. Most of the times it had been hers, but in some occasions the bed had been the property of her casual sexual partner. She had slept next to them, below them, on top of them, across them. She really did not know the exact number of beds she had been a guest in, or the exact number of men she had entertained in her own. What she did know, however, was that she had a history of bed sharing that could have filled several books. She was also certain that she had never laid next to a man she had not had intercourse with up until this point.

 

Detective Inspector Jack Robinson was sleeping soundly after what Phryne knew had had to be a severe case of shell-shock. Poor man, the bombings and the circumstances surrounding them had to be taking a toll on him, just as they would on any other survivor. She had read about this before, and she had even discussed it with Mac after the war ended and the men started to come back home as only shells of what they’d once been. A lot of them slept for hours, even days, after these terrible episodes. It had to be terrible, she imagined, to revisit the horrors of the trenches, the death, the terror, all the while feeling as if they were back there. As if they had never left. Or worse: as if it had all begun over again.

 

It had happened to her more times than she cared to admit. Most of the times it wasn’t the memories of the war that tortured her, but what had followed it and what life had been like before. René and the hell he’d put her through. The violence. The anger. The fear. Her sister’s disappearance. The loss. The grieving. The doubts. The hope that refused to die, but that weighted inside her like a ton of bricks disguised as a withering flower. Sometimes she’d dream about it, or sharp visual memories would assault her, triggered by something. Sometimes she’d think about those things- Janey was never far from her mind. But Phryne had never ended up a shivering, sweating mess on the floor of her parlour, though. Nor had she had to take medication to calm herself down. It didn’t mean she handled things better than Jack or others that did- it just meant she handled them differently. Whilst she had never been cornered by her demons to the point she no longer had control over her own body, she was not foreign to demons chasing her until she got so tired she lost all control over her own mind.

 

She had gone to his house early in the morning to pick him up. His motorcar was still in the shop, and even if their partnership had suffered the consequences of their not seeing eye to eye after Gerty’s murder case, Jack was not stubborn nor was he proud enough to choose the tram over the Hispano-Suiza. They were working on an important case, and this was case related. Since they had not been able to track Toby Fletcher’s home address, they had decided to go to the publishing house first thing in the morning and intercept him there. The kid had seemed very responsible; he took his job seriously. If they had any chance to find him, it would be at the publishing house before he started his delivery route.

 

It wasn’t that she didn’t know how to knock on a door, or that she went around breaking into people’s houses because she could. She only did so when she had absolutely no other option left- or maybe when she knew that the homeowner was not likely to invite her in with a smile on their face and a tray with biscuits and tea. In this particular circumstance, it had been the former. She had knocked on Jack's door and patiently awaited for him to answer- but he hadn't. And so Phryne had not seen another way, but to put a certain set of skills of hers to use.

 

The sight she found when she let herself inside his home was one she would not be forgetting anytime soon.

 

It hadn't been the first person she had seen in such a state. She had tended to wounded men during and after the conflict. She had been to hospitals wards, too. Phryne had always been respectful and understanding of those men’s situations, and whilst she had felt sad for them, she had never been left feeling terribly devastated and helpless.

 

Because they hadn't been Jack.

 

Because they hadn’t been men whom she had shared such a deep connection.

 

What made that morning’s episode different was that it was him who was suffering. It was him she found shattered to pieces. And it was her heart that shattered a little, too. For someone who considered herself to be a very empathic person, she had never experienced someone else's pain as terribly or sharply in her very own flesh.

 

She could lie to him, to others, and she could even try to lie to herself about why she had reacted the way she did and took care of him. He was a human being, a former soldier, he needed help. She was well known for extending a helping hand to those in need. The bad blood between them, the tension, the friendship that had been tainted- all of that mattered very little when someone was fighting a battle that no one should go through alone. She would have helped anyone in that situation, whether they were the best of friends or simple strangers.

 

But it wasn't a stranger. It was Jack. Her Jack, her dear Detective Inspector Robinson. The man now sleeping next to her. The man whose damp, sticky hair she was still running her long, perfectly manicured fingers through.

 

The man she had left the investigation aside for.

 

Somewhere between comforting him and lulling him to sleep and climbing on the bed next to him, Phryne had made a decision and telephoned Constable Collins to give him instructions. She wasn't sure she was allowed to do that, but it wasn't like Jack had been awake to tell her otherwise. Someone had to go talk to Toby Fletcher, and the inspector was in no fit state to do so. She couldn't leave him like that, either. But she couldn't just ignore the fact that there had been several serious attacks and that hundreds of people were there. Toby Fletcher was an important piece to solving this, and someone needed to go wait for him outside the publishing house. Constable Collins, she decided, would be perfect for this task. The young boy was hard-working, and clever, and eager to learn more. Well, Phryne believed real life was as good as any classroom. And theoretical knowledge couldn't be that much better than practical experience when it came to serving and protecting the people of Victoria. Jack would have approved of this, agreed with her that the chance would not be wasted on Constable Collins. The man seemed certainly enthusiastic about what was asked of him. By the time Phryne got off the telephone with him, he had promised to contact her as soon as he had any news.

 

So there she was now, waiting. Waiting for the inspector to come to or for Constable Collins to telephone with information, whatever happened first. She had never been good at waiting, let alone just sitting around whilst others were in the centre of the action. Phryne didn't have much to do there other than comfort Jack in his sleep and run a dampened cloth to keep his overheated skin cool. And yet, for some reason it was as if there was no task more important in the world than the one she was in charge of at the moment.

 

It was really scary how this man was the exception to so many rules.

 

She felt him move by her side, the mattress shifting under them both. He was stirring, becoming a little bit agitated, though nothing liked he'd been when Phryne had arrived.

 

He was starting to wake up. He opened his eyes, which remained unfocused for a couple of seconds. She knew some men had trouble acknowledging their surroundings or even themselves when they first came to it after a difficult shell-shock episode.

 

“Jack,” she called his name softly, almost reverently. “Jack, you’re all right. You’re home.”

 

“Miss… Miss Fisher,” he gasped. His voice sounded awfully hoarse.

 

His mouth had to be awfully dry. She got up and went out of the room and into the kitchen to pour him a glass of water. The one on his nightstand was empty. Phryne wondered if she'd find a jug as well. Plenty of fresh water would do him good. Soldiers had always been desperate for water when they woke up in the improvised infirmary or during the ride there in the ambulance. Even if it had all happened inside his head, Jack was still a soldier that had gotten injured in a battle.

 

As he laid still there on the bed, face up to the ceiling, he thought of how he had gotten there. He had a brief memory of what had happened before Miss Fisher arrived, and most of the events that had led him to the current situation. He mostly remembered sensations, the feel of her hands on his hair, his last thought before falling into a deep slumber that he prayed it wasn’t too sticky or too sweaty (but knowing all the while that it was probably both). She had made him drink something, and he hoped against hoped that that had been the case for why he felt soothed and calmed enough to let sleep claim him. For the other option was that the reason behind his calmness had been due to his relief that the woman had just left his bedroom had been there when he woke up.

 

His bedroom! She’d been there with him (he also remembered thinking that, on the occasions he had indulged himself about her spending any time with him there, he had never imagined it would be circumstances like this ). The side of the bed opposite to his was wrinkled, and so was the pillow, so he supposed she had been laying there by his side whilst he was out. Making an enormous effort to sit up a little, he got a glimpse of the clock and realized that he had been asleep for a couple of hours. It was now too late to go to the publishing house and intercept Toby Fletcher- it was probable that the boy had already finished his delivery route. They would have to wait until the following day. That meant one more day without putting the culprits away. One more day without giving justice and resolution to the victims and their families.

 

He felt like he’d failed them somehow. He was supposed to be out investigating, doing what he did best. His battle and scars were old, but the loved ones of the dead people in those bombings were fresh and raw. And yet, he gave himself the luxury of collapsing under the hand of his own demons. It wasn’t fair. He had already had his time to try and heal (although, he knew, that was a task no one ever completed fully.) He had devoted his life to serving and protecting others, and now when the city needed him most, he was letting his past affect him and his work like this.

 

When the fear, the uncertainty, the sense of pending doom had returned after the attack on the train station, a part of him had been somehow relieved that, if all  hell were to drag him down again, at least he’d be going down alone. Last time, Rosie had been a factor, the wife of a soldier trying to cope with something she did not understand nor did she have the strength to get close to. Now he was a lonely man (although he’d long ago admitted to himself that he had felt lonelier during his marriage.) That meant he wouldn’t be a burden for anyone. He’d face the darkest corners of his mind and heart by himself, and no one would suffer as a result of his inability to fully heal. No collateral damage.

 

But he wasn’t completely alone, now was he? Did Miss Fisher’s presence in his life have anything to do with the fact that loneliness had not seemed like such a great thing after his separation? Did he even have the mental and emotional stability required to go through these thoughts?

 

He hadn’t been alone when he’d woken up moments before. That hadn’t happened in a long time. Rosie had never known how to manage the situation, the nightmares, the terror, the screams. Jack had ended up sleeping in their small guest bedroom long before they decided to separate. They had not shared a bed during the majority of their time being a couple, and when they had realized that children wouldn’t be a part of their marriage life they had just stopped even sharing a bed for a couple of hours of physical intimacy. Waking up with the Honourable Phryne Fisher right next to him, on his bed, had been the closest he had been to sharing any bedroom intimacy with a woman in a while. Even if she had left almost immediately (a thought he tried not to dwell on too much), the evidence that she had been there with him was too strong to go unnoticed. And once awake he wondered if her presence had had anything to do with the fact that he had slept calmly, no nightmares that he could remember. He knew it was ridiculous to think a person’s close proximity could hold off the hell brewing within a soldier, a survivor, but the idea refused to let up.

 

He was doing his best to organize these thoughts and feelings whilst trying to physically recover from his episode when she came back to the room, a jug of water in her hand.

 

“Miss Fisher,” he said again, this time his voice a little bit clearer.

 

She poured him a glass of water and then held it to his lips.

 

“Drink up, Jack,” she said. “Some fresh water will do you good”

 

He managed to sit up straighter, his back against the headboard. His clothes were soaked in sweat. He drank the water with her help. His mouth was as dry as cotton.

 

The thirst was another thing that reminded him of the war. He knew of men that had gone on for days without a drop of water. The next time they had been offered a drink, they had drank so quickly and desperately they had choked and vomited.

 

“I went without water two days once. By the time I was allowed some, I was so thirsty I drank up so much it made me sick and I vomited. My father used to withhold water from us when we misbehaved. I hadn't done anything that time, but I was protecting Janey. I was seven. I saw some men do the same during war.”

 

She didn't know why she was sharing that with him. It was very delicate information from a time of her life that Phryne rarely spoke of. She hadn't even told Mac about this particular incident with her father when she was a child. If anything, it would make the good doctor hate the baron even more (not that he didn't deserve it- she just didn't want someone as loving as Mac being tainted by the poison that was hatred.) But for some reason she had wanted to share this with Jack in this particular moment. The words had left her mouth without her thinking them first, and Phryne only realized what she was saying and how heavy the  information was once she had said it.

 

He looked at her with eyes that still seemed lost and pleading at the moment. But they also shone with understanding she somehow knew she'd never find with anyone else. Perhaps it had not been the ideal time or place for such a confession, but Jack did not appear to be altered or upset by this. Knowing that she had found the strength to fight several battles since childhood made her even more beautiful and special in his eyes. She was a warrior. A soldier, just like him. She had survived, not only the war but an upbringing marked by abuse and the disappearance of her sister, followed by more abuse at the hands of a man she had thought she could trust. But she had survived it all. She had fought, emerged from her ashes when burnt, and she was there. And so was he. She was a survivor, that was what this story she was sharing was meant to remind him. And he was a survivor, too.

 

“Thank you,” he said. He was sounding better. Stronger.

 

It wasn't clear if he was thanking her for the water, for taking care of him when she found him at his worst, for staying, or for allowing him an insight on a part of her life she didn't like reminiscing much about. Maybe it was everything. She didn't ask, and he didn't offer any clarifications. For once, they just let things be between them without overthinking.

 

“I'm sorry for…” Jack started, but she didn't let him finish.

 

“You have nothing to be sorry for, Jack,” Phryne reminded him softly.

 

She was sitting on the end of the bed now, looking at him with those big, tantalizing eyes that he so often dreamed about. They said what couldn't be put into words, but Jack longed to hear. They gave him comfort, just like her hands had when she'd smoothed his sticky hair until he fell asleep.

 

He still felt like a failure, though. He felt guilty. He had let her and the people that deserved justice for their lost lives in the bombings down.

 

“I insist on apologizing.” He set the empty glass back on the nightstand by his bed. “We were supposed to track down young Toby Fletcher…”

 

Once again, Phryne did not let him finish.

 

“That has been taken care of, Jack.” He gave her a puzzled look, so she explained: “I telephoned Constable Collins and gave him instructions to go to the publishing house to try and find Toby Fletcher. I told him how he looks, where exactly the boys wait for the newspapers copies they have to deliver, and that he always shows up first. I also told him which questions he should ask. He said he would get in contact with us immediately.”

 

“Oh, er… good,” Jack said.

 

He knew Constable Collins would follow through with this task. He really appreciated and admired him- and those weren't sentiments he went around giving away graciously. He really did think that the boy had potential. It had been a good call on Miss Fisher’s part. He only hoped that Constable Collins would not get in trouble with Detective Inspector Walker. Walker had told Jack he had permission to follow the leads he and Miss Fisher had found, but he had never mentioned whether they could use other City South resources this freely.

 

“Don't worry about Hugh, Jack,” Miss Fisher said, and once again a thought of her being a mind reader popped into the inspector’s head. “He had just gotten off duty when we spoke on the telephone. There are no rules against constables doing a friend a favour in their free time.”

 

He was about to smile, truly smile, despite the terrible ache he felt in every muscle in his body. But the telephone rang, and the smile died on his face before his lips even began to curl. Miss Fisher got up and moved across the room and out of it with a familiarity and elegance that could have fooled anyone into believing she belonged there. Even if it was her first time in his bedroom, Jack had an awful feeling in the pit of his stomach that this was a space he had always been meant to share with the lady detective and no one else.

 

The inspector scolded himself mentally. She didn't belong anywhere, or to anyone. She certainly didn't belong with him. She was free. Nothing or no one tied her down. Had it not been the issue that forced him apart? Was it not reason enough to keep some distance? To leave her be and try to do the same himself? They were compatible in so many ways, but apparently incompatible in the way that mattered the most to him. And it hurt so much that he had not even been able to go on as partners, as friends, because he knew he'd never stop wanting more from her. Things she could not give. Things he was not supposed to expect or ask for…

 

His torturing musings would have gone on had it not been for the return of Miss Fisher. She walked inside the bedroom (once again, it all looked so natural, so real.) Her face, which Jack could read as well as any of Shakespeare's sonnets by now, gave away that the telephone call she'd just gone off to answer had not been good.

 

Before she opened her mouth to speak, he knew it was bad news. So he opened his first:

 

“Was that Constable Collins?”

 

He was anxious to know. Had there been another attack? Had there been any more bombings? Jack fought his hardest to keep memories of dead children in a train station from resurfacing.

 

“Yes, that was Hugh on the telephone,” Miss Fisher said. “He went to the publishing house and waited for Toby Fletcher to show up. He never did.”

 

Jack was perplexed by this. He understood Miss Fisher's worrisome expression now. Had something happened to the boy? Had the people behind the attacks found out they had talked to him? Had they done anything to him?

 

“He didn't sound like the type to skip a day of work,” he said, a knot in his throat and stomach. His mouth was feeling very dry again all of a sudden.

 

“That's the problem, Jack,” Miss Fisher said. “Hugh asked around, and no one at the publishing house knows a hawke boy named Toby Fletcher.”


End file.
